Optimize your

WordPress site
Joost de Valk,
Annelieke van den Berg,
Michiel Heijmans,
Marieke van de Rakt,
Thijs de Valk
Colophon
2014 Yoast
ISBN/EAN 978-90-822653-1-6
NUR 988
Publisher: Yoast
Authors: Joost de Valk, Michiel Heijmans,
Marieke van de Rakt, Thijs de Valk,
Annelieke van den Berg,
Editor: Marieke van de Rakt
Design: Mijke Peters
Illustrations: Erwin Brouwer
Edition: 1
3
Table of Contents
Introduction 5
About this book 6
WordPress 8
Search Engine Optimization 13
Introduction to Search Engine Optimization 15
Keyword research 20
Site Structure 29
Technical SEO 38
SEO copywriting 45
Link building 50
Further reading 54
Navigation 55
Introduction to navigation 57
Top menu navigation: coming in from the North 60
Navigation in main content: the Wild West 65
Sidebar: in the East 72
Footer: in the South 75
Mobile website 78
Further reading 81
4
Sales 82
Making money with your website 84
The checkout process 91
Further reading 94
Analytics 95
What is Google Analytics? 97
Improving your website with Google Analytics 106
Further reading 112
Conversion Research 113
A / B Tests 115
Survey research 121
Further reading 127
Social Media 128
Why use social media? 130
How to use social media? 134
Further reading 141
Speed 142
Checking your site speed 144
Increasing your site speed 146
Further reading 152
5
Section
Introduction
by Marieke van de Rakt
6
Chapter 1
About this book
Introduction
Building a WordPress website isnt that hard. WordPress was developed
in order to make blogging easy and accessible for a very large audience.
You can fgure out WordPress yourself, or use one of the numerous
manuals that will help you set up your site. Subsequently, you can up -
grade your site with many plugins, for instance allowing your website to
become a shop.
And then what? How do you make sure your site stands out from all of the
other ones on the internet? How do you make sure people fnd your
website? What do you have to do to make people buy your stuf?
Installing your WordPress site is only the beginning. In order to have a
website which keeps appealing to your audience, you will have an endless
job in keeping your content and design up to date. You will have to do
continuous Search Engine Optimization in order to make sure that people
fnd your website on Google and other search engines. You should make
sure users of your website can fnd the information you want them to
fnd. And if you have a shop, you should make sure that people can fnd
and (want to) buy your products.
7
Content of this book
This book will help you to optimize your WordPress site. The book consists
of multiple sections, which can be read in any order you like. Each section
will teach you the basics of one aspect of website optimization. Well teach
you the basics of Search Engine Optimization and explain the importance
of user interface and good navigation. Furthermore, we will give the most
important insights on improving your sales and conversions. The sections
are written by experts in the feld of SEO, Navigation, Conversion and
Analytics.
Search engine - terminology
In this book, we will write Google when we refer to a search engine. Of
course, there are many other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo. But
since Google pretty much dominates the search engine market, we will
only refer to Google in our texts.
8
Chapter 2
WordPress
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS) you can
use for your blog or your webshop. It was frst released in 2003, by Matt
Mullenweg and Mike Little. Nowadays, it powers up to 20% of the websites
on the web. WordPress started as just a blogging system, but is since then
evolved to be used as a full Content Management System for your website.
Of course, at Yoast, we are WordPress-fans. And with good reason! Word-
Press is free and open source. It is easy to use and allows for great
fexibility. WordPress has a plugin architecture which allows users to
extend the functionality of the website beyond the core installation.
Plugins are pieces of code which extend the functionality. WordPress
ensures simplicity for users, while allows for complexity for developers.
9
Why use WordPress?
Lets take a look at the advantages of using WordPress over other Content
Management Systems! You can read much more about the features and
requirements and fnd testimonials on WordPress.org.
Its very easy!
Making content in WordPress is very easy. Its just as easy as making a
document in Microsoft Word. You dont even have to be able to read or
write code in order to create a post in WordPress. Everybody with a little
computer skills is able to maintain his or her own blog using WordPress.
Its very fexible!
You can create a personal website, a photoblog or a business website.
You can make it any way you like. You can easily change appearances by
adding a diferent theme and give your website an entirely diferent look.
WordPress comes with a few default themes, but you can choose from
thousands of themes to give your website the look you want. Numerous
sites ofer free and premium themes. Uploading a new theme is really
easy and can give your website a complete new look in a matter of
seconds.
WordPress core already comes with features for every user, but you
can upgrade your functionality with plugins. There are literally tens of
thousands of plugins (free and paid) which allow for social media widgets,
spam protection and so much more.
10
Yoast Tip
At Yoast, we ofer several themes and numerous free and premium
plugins to optimize your website.
Its very free!
You do not have to pay any kind of license fee to WordPress. Its free! And
its open source. So you are free to use WordPress in any way you choose:
you can install it, use it, change it, distribute it. As the most popular CMS
on the web, WordPress has a large and supportive community. A lot of
very skilled developers work together to make WordPress even better.
You can ask questions on support forums and get help from volunteers.
WordPress is licensed under a GPL open source license, which is a pretty
complex bit of text, but it means that:
You can charge for distributing, supporting, or documenting the soft-
ware, but you cannot sell the software itself.
If you create derivative works that use pieces of code that are licensed
under the GPL, those derivative works should also be licensed under
the GPL.
That last bit is very important, it basically prevents the software from ever
becoming a proprietary piece of software.
Where to start
If you do not have a WordPress site and you would like to get started with
WordPress, you should check out WordPress.org/about.
11
To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:
PHP version 5.2.4 or higher;
MySQL version 5.0 or higher.
You can download and install a software script from WordPress.org and
then you should be able to get started. Most hosts actually have a Word-
Press installer in their backends, allowing you to install WordPress by the
click of a button.
There is a lively support community in the WordPress forums that is
eager to help you if you have questions, the WordPress codex and a site
like WPBeginner are also great places to start working with WordPress.
Yoast and WordPress
At Yoast we make money using WordPress. This might seem counterin-
tuitive. Should all the software we develop be free just because we
develop for WordPress? We ofer and will continue to ofer free plugins.
In order for Yoast to continue to develop our products and to give
support, we have to sell stuf. We sell consultancy and we sell (support
and updates to our) plugins and themes.
12
For the free plugins, there are volunteers on the WordPress forums, but
we dont often dive in. With millions of users and only 12 of us, we simply
cannot answer all the questions of individual users ourselves.
That being said, we want to stress that all of our products are open source
and we are big believers in the power of open source. In our opinion:
making money in an open source community is benefcial for the open
source community as long as you continue to invest in the open source
community. If you want to read more about our view, you can read our
post Victory of the Commons.
13
Section
Search Engine Optimization
by Joost de Valk
14
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of SEO. We will tell you what
Google does and what SEO exactly is. In the following chapters we will
teach you how to do a keyword research and to set up the structure and
the internal linking structure of the website. We will give the basics of
technical SEO, tell you some things about SEO copywriting. In the last
chapter (8) of this section we will give some information about link
building.
15
Chapter 3
Introduction to Search Engine
Optimization
What does Google do?
How does Google fnd your site?
Search engines like Google follow links. It follows links from one webpage
to another webpage. A search engine like Google consists of a crawler, an
index and an algorithm. A crawler follow the links on the web. It goes around
the internet 24-7 and saves the HTML-version of a page in a gigantic
database, the index. This index is updated if Google has come around
your website and fnds a new or revised version. Depending on the trafc
on your site and the amount of changes you make on your website,
Google comes around more or less often. For Google to know of the exis-
tence of your website, there frst has to be a link from another site to your
site. Following that link will lead to the frst crawler-session and the frst
save in the index.
Googles secret algorithm
After indexing your website, Google can show your website in the search
results.
Google has a specifc algorithm that decides which pages in which order
are shown. How this algorithm works is a secret, nobody knows exactly
which factors decide the ordering of the search results. Moreover, factors
16
and their importance change very often. Testing and experimenting gives
us a relatively good feel for the important factors and the changes in
these factors.
Googles results page
Googles result page shows 7 or 10 links to sites which ft best to your
keyword. We refer to these results as the organic search results. If you
click to the second page, more results are shown. Above these 10 blue
links, often are two or three paid links. These links are ads, people have
paid Google to put these links at the top of the site when people search
for a specifc term. Prices for these ads greatly vary, depending on the
competitiveness of the search term. In the column on the right of the
Google-screen, ads often appear as well.
The value of links for search engines
Its very important to have a basic understanding of how Google (and
most search engines) use links: they use the number of links pointing to a
page to determine how important that page is. Both internal (links from
the own website) as well as external links could help in the ranking of your
website in Google. Some links are more important than others: links from
websites who have a lot of links themselves are generally more important
than links from small websites.
Universal search
Next to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items,
pictures and videos in its search results. This embedment is called universal
search.
17
What is Search Engine Optimization?
High ranking in organic search results
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the profession that attempts to opti-
mize sites to make them appear in a high position in the organic search
results. In order to do so, SEO tries to ft ones website to Googles
algorithm. Although Googles algorithm remains secret, almost a decade
of experience in SEO has resulted in a pretty good idea about the import-
ant factors. In our view, the factors in Googles algorithm can be divided
in two categories:
1 There are on-page factors which decide the ranking of your website.
These factors include technical issues (e.g. the quality of your code)
and more textual issues (e.g. structure of your site and text, use of
words).
2 There are the of-page factors. These factors include the links to your
site. The more other (relevant) sites link to your website, the higher
your ranking in Google will be.
In the following chapters, we thoroughly discuss on-page factors. The
of-page factors are much harder to infuence. In chapter 8, we discuss
link building as one technique to infuence your ranking via of-page
factors.
18
Make an awesome website!
In the following chapters, we
will teach you the basics of SEO.
At Yoast, we give SEO-advice to
(small) website owners and
large consultancy clients (the
Guardian, Facebook). Joost de
Valk began his SEO-career over
8 years ago. And although Google has changed its algorithm quite a few
times, most of the advice we give at Yoast has remained the same over
the years. And this advice is very simple: you just have to make sure your
site is damn good. Do not use any tricks, because they usually dont work
in the long run, and might even backfre. Googles mission is to build the
perfect search engine that helps people fnd what they are looking for.
Making your website and your marketing strategy ft for this goal is always
the way to go.
WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast
Yoast is most famous for our WordPress SEO plugin (WP SEO). Most of
the technical aspects of SEO you should do actually are covered by our
free WordPress SEO plugin. Installing the plugin and using the default
settings already improves quite a lot. It even fxes some minor issues
WordPress has. WP SEO also helps in writing SEO-friendly content (see
chapter 7). Our advice is to download and install the WP SEO plugin by
Yoast on your website. Of course, there are other SEO plugins, but our
plugin is the most complete and your website remains fast. Next to a
19
free plugin, we also ofer a premium WP SEO plugin. In the premium
plugin extra functionality is added and customers of this premium
plugin can ask our team for support.
20
Chapter 4
Keyword research
Introduction
The frst step in optimizing any website for a search engine is to start think-
ing about the searching strategies of your audience. What search strategies
do they have? Which search terms will they use? These questions are the
beginning of your keyword research. In this chapter, we will give practical
tips how to conduct your own keyword research. Keyword research is
actually the basis of all search marketing. You have to know which search
terms people use when looking for your website or product.
Step 1: write down your mission
What do you do?
What makes your website unique? What idea or product do you sell?
And why should people buy this from you? Make sure your mission is
clear in your mind as well as on your website.You want to be found on
the terms that ft your site. You want to be found by your (potential)
customers. Ranking on terms that dont ft your site, will result in a high
bounce rate (visitors immediately leave your site, because your site is not
what they expect it to be). A high bounce rate indeed indicates that your
website does not ft the search needs of customers and Google could
well adjust the ranking after high bounce rates. A high bounce rate could
eventually lead to a lower ranking in Google.
21
Competitiveness of the market
Whether or not you will be able to rank on the terms you choose, largely
depends on the market you are in. Some markets are highly competitive,
with large companies dominating the search results. These companies
have a very large budget to spend on marketing in general and SEO
specifcally. Ranking in these markets is hard. Find out what diferentiates
your company from these big boys and adjust your search terms to your
niche. For instance, if you sell holidays to the carribean you will have a
hard time ranking on holiday caribbean. Perhaps your focus is on travels
specifcally for the elderly or for newlyweds. Ranking on holiday caribbean
elderly or holiday caribbean newlyweds would be much easier and could be
a better strategy.
Step 2: on what search terms do you want
to be found?
Making a list
Make a list of all the search terms you want to be found on. This phase is
hard (as well as crucial). What terms will people use? You really have to
get inside the heads of your audience. How do people search? And what
is the problem your website (or product) resolves? Which question does
your website answer?
A few years ago, doing your keyword research was easier. You could
simply check Google Analytics to see on which terms people found your
website. That is no longer possible. So you are pretty much left in the dark
about the terms people use in search engine to end up at your website. If
22
you have visitors who come to your website using Bing, you should be
able to view their search terms.
Tools you could use
You may want to use some tools in order to get started:
Google Adwords Keyword Planner
This can be a very useful tool, with the slight caveat that the search
volume data in the planner is really only useful for keywords that youre
actually spending money to advertise on. Use the tool to fnd new and
related keywords, but neglect the search volume data!
yoast.com/suggest/
This tool uses the Google Suggest functionality you know from search-
ing in Google. It fnds the keyword expansions Google gives and then
requests more of them. So if you type example, itll also give you the
expansions for example a till example z etc. Its a great way to
quickly fnd more niche keywords you can focus on. A similar tool is
bersuggest.
Google Trends
While you cant reliably get trafc information for keywords, Google
Trends does allow you to relatively compare the trafc for sets of
keywords. Check this query for instance, comparing the relative growth
of several WordPress SEO terms and our brand Yoast. You can even
see the diference for numerous geographical regions.
Its very important to check Google Trends if you expect that some of
your keywords are seasonal, for instance due to regulations, holiday
seasons etc.
23
Your internal search engine
What are people looking for on your site? A category we always fnd
particularly interesting is the set of keywords that didnt get any results:
this was stuf people were expecting but didnt fnd, its very possible
for you to give those products a diferent name. You can do this with
our Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.
Long-tail keywords
The tools may help you to make an extensive list of search terms people
use to end up on your site. Do also think about combinations of terms.
Make sure you dont just pick terms that consist of one word only. The
longer (and more specifc) search terms are, the easier it will be to rank on
the term. These longer terms are called long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are more specifc and less common, and will probably
be used by potential visitors that already know what they want to fnd or
buy. The long-tail user will search for compare prices macbook air desktop
stand instead of doing a search for a so-called head keyword like macbook
air stand. Siri and Google Now encourage searches like: Where can I fnd
the best cofee in Seattle?
One of the main benefts of using long-tail keywords is that, although
these keywords may be used less in search, the visitor that fnds your
website using them is more likely to buy your stuf. He or she has already
thought things over, has possibly compared products or types and there-
fore does a more specifc search.
24
Yoast Tip
When you do a search in Google, be sure to scroll to the bottom of
the frst search result page to fnd a list of possible long-tail keywords
for your term in the Searches related to [keyword] section.
Step 3: create landing pages
Use the list of keywords you have made and put it in a table. A table (use
for instance Excel or Google Docs / Sheets to set one up) forces you to a
structure and to make a landing page for all the search terms you came
up with. Put the search terms in the frst column and add columns in
which you put the diferent levels of your sites structure. In chapter 5 you
can read more about site structure.
Search
terms
level 1:
homepage
level 2:
/subpages
level 3: /sub/
subpages
level 4: sub/
sub/subpages
term 1
term 2
term 3
term 4
Figure1: search terms
The more specifc your search term is, the further down into your site
structure you put your landing page of this term. Make sure that you make
a landing page for every search term you come up with.
25
Example keyword research
The theory of keyword research can be a bit dry. We will spice things up!
Well give you an example of step 1 to 3. Lets say that I have a blog about
children. I write about childrens clothes, childrens room and childrens
toys. I blog about new products, about things that I have bought and like
and about new trends.
Step 1: mission
My mission is to describe the latest trends about clothing, decoration and
toys for children.
Step 2: keywords
childrens clothes childrens clothes trends
childrens room childrens room accessories
childrens room furniture childrens room accessories trends
childrens decorations childrens decorations trends
childrens toys childrens toys trends
26
Step 3: pages
Search
terms
level 1:
homepage.com
level 2:
/subpages
level 3: /sub/
subpages
level 4: sub/
sub/subpages
Childrens
clothes
homepage.
com/clothing
Childrens
clothes trends
/clothing/
trends
Childrens
room
homepage.
com/room
Childrens
room accessoires
/room/
accessoires
Childrens room
accessoires trends
/room/acces-
soires/trends
Figure 2: pages
Now, of course Did we make the right choice?
27
As you can see from this Google Trends chart, kids clothes, for instance, is
actually far more sought after. Which means we could go after the probably
less competitive, childrens clothes etc anyway, or go for kids clothes. There
are no rights or wrongs in this regard, you just have to be aware that
youre making this decision.
Cornerstone articles
Important content
Really important content deserves a page within your sites structure, not
a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks. We
refer to these important pages as cornerstone articles. So, you go ahead
and create these cornerstone pages within your site. Take some time
for it, this is going to be the content thats going to make you rank. Real
people will read it and you need to convince those people. So think about
search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that
will end up on that page and give him / her something worthwhile. This
also means youre not going to create other pages within your site that
target the exact same keyword, but if you discuss the keyword, you link to
this page! Read more about site structure in chapter 5.
28
Yoast Tip
Make sure that these cornerstone articles, the articles on which
people enter your site, have a clear call-to-action. This means that it
will be clear at the end of the page (and preferably on the top as well)
what you want people to do. Do you want them to keep on reading:
lead them to other, preferably related articles. Do you want them to
buy your stuf: lead them to your shop. Do you want them to
subscribe to your newsletter: ofer them a form to sign up.
29
Chapter 5
Site Structure
Introduction
The way your site is structured will give Google important clues about
where to fnd the most important content. A good site structure could
thus lead to a higher ranking in Google. Your sites structure determines
whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how
easily it will fnd and index content relevant to your sites purpose and
intent. In this chapter, we will explain the importance of site structure and
give practical tips which will help you set up or upgrade the structure of
your own website. This chapter is a revision of a previous article written
in 2011 and published on yoast.com.
Creating a pyramid
By creating a good structure, you can use the content youve written that
has attracted links from others. Your sites structure can help to spread
some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial
site, that means that you can use the quality content youve written to
boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.
When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to
draw out your sites structure in something like Visio (or even putting it in
Excel). In chapter 3 we help you to create such a structure. What youll
want to do is put all the pages and sections of your website in a structure
30
as a tree. After drawing your sites structure, you can analyze the faults in
the structure of your website.
Based on a yoast.com structure from many years ago, you would
draw something like fgure 3:
Sub-
page 1
Sub-
page 3
Sub-
page 1
Sub-
page 3
Sub-
page 2
Sub-
page 4
Sub-
page 2
Sub-
page 4
Sub-
page
Sub-
page
WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog
Tool 2
Code
Etc. Project 1
Project 2
Etc.
Site 1
Site 2
Etc.
About
Home
Projects Sites Contact
Figure 3: a typical site sketch
Analyzing your pyramid
A balanced pyramid
An ideal site structure should look somewhat like a pyramid from ancient
Egypt. When working on your site structure, you thus should try to realise
a reasonably balanced pyramid for your site structure. On the top of the
pyramid is your homepage, with buttons allowing people to go down to
the second level. From the pages on the second levels, people are able
to navigate to pages on the third level (and so on). As you go down in
levels in your website, the number of pages will go up.
31
We would advise you to have something between 2 and 7 main sections,
depending on how content heavy your site is.
Equally large sections
You can make subsections beneath your main sections. Make sure that
sections are about equally large. If sections are too large, you should
divide them into two main sections. A good rule of thumb for the size of
sections is to make sure that no section is more than twice as large as any
other section. Large section should have a prominent place on your home-
page. Indeed, if a section is relatively large, this is apparently something
you write much content about. Dividing such a section in two separate
ones, would then result in a more accurate refection of the content on
your website.
Looking at fgure 3 clearly shows that the old yoast.com structure
was unbalenced. As you can see, the Code section constituted more
than half of the entire site. So our sections were not at all equally
large.
Sub-
page 1
Sub-
page 3
Sub-
page 1
Sub-
page 3
Sub-
page 2
Sub-
page 4
Sub-
page 2
Sub-
page 4
Sub-
page
Sub-
page
WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog
Tool 2
Code
Etc. Project 1
Project 2
Etc.
Site 1
Site 2
Etc.
About
Home
Projects Sites Contact
32
Structure should refect content
In making your site structure, make sure that the structure refects the
content. Similar things should be grouped together, while things that are
in fact diferent should be put in another section.
The structure of the old yoast.com was unbalanced did not refect
the content. There were three pages that were basically about
Joost de Valk: About, Projects and Websites. These three pages
were not very diferent in content, but were treated diferently in
structure.
Sub-
page 1
Sub-
page 3
Sub-
page 1
Sub-
page 3
Sub-
page 2
Sub-
page 4
Sub-
page 2
Sub-
page 4
Sub-
page
Sub-
page
WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog
Tool 2
Code
Etc. Project 1
Project 2
Etc.
Site 1
Site 2
Etc.
About
Home
Projects Sites Contact
Trafc
Pages that generate a lot of trafc should have a prominent place on your
website. Check your site statistics to see which pages are very popular.
Try to put these pages relatively high in your site structure. These pages
apparently attract a lot of trafc and need a high place on your pyramid.
33
In our example, we found out that the WordPress pages were
responsible for about 30% of the site trafc, but were down on the
third and fourth level.
Designing a new site structure
After you have analyzed the faults in your site structure you can rear-
range sections and make up a new and improved site structure. Make
sure you draw a balanced pyramid, giving more popular pages a higher
place in the pyramid.
At yoast.com, we did exactly that. In fgure 4 you can see our new
solution.
Subpage 1
Subpage 2 Subpage 2 Tool 2 Projects
Subpage 3 Subpage 3 Etc.
Subpage 4 Subpage 4
Subpage 1 Tool 1 Websites
WordPress Articles Code About Contact
Home/Blog
Figure 4: a more refned section structure.
As you can see we decided to move some pages up the tree, and
also removed some pages. When youre rethinking your site
structure youll often fnd that some pages are not really benefcial
to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if thats
the case.
34
Another choice we made was to move the blog to the home page.
The homepage was utter nonsense, and basically yet another
About Joost de Valk page. And though Joost likes himself, thats
not what we were hoping people came to our site for.
Naming your sections
Once youre satisfed with your site structure, have a look at the names
you have come up with for your sections. If you have enough content
about a subject for it to be able to have its own section, you can bet
people are searching for it as well. Thats why its very wise to make sure
your section names use the keywords people are searching for! Pick the
right names for your sections and subsections, and youre halfway there.
Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make
sure to keep them short and clean.
For example, if youre like us and youve written WordPress
plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that
section WordPress. What would people search for? If they want a
new plugin for WordPress, they would probably use WordPress
plugins for a search term. That would also be the term for that
section. Our sections had names as shown in fgure 5.
35
WordPress
Plugins
SEO
Tools
Code
Snippets
About
Joost de Valk
Contact
SEO Blog
Figure 5: sensible section names
1
Internal link structure
If you did it all right with your new site structure, it should look like a pyra-
mid. Now you should consider how youre going to connect the sections
of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside
your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to
all its subpages, and the other way around. So, al the subpages within a
pyramid should link to the page at the top of the pyramid.
Because youre linking from pages that are closely related to each other
content-wise, youre increasing your sites possibility to rank. Doing it like
this, will help the search engine out by showing it whats related and
what isnt.
1 we already updated our site structure again (and again), but this remains the
most vivid example.
36
Take fgure 6 as an example:
WordPress
Plugins
SEO Blog
Plugin 3 Plugin 4
Plugin 1 Plugin 2
Subpage 3 Subpage 4
Subpage 1 Subpage 2
Figure 6: you also need to consider how the pages link to
each other within each section.
You should make sure you keep your links between each page
relevant to those pages. For example, if you linked from subpage
3 to plugin 2 all the time, the search engine might think that
subpage 3 was related to plugin 2, whereas its only related to
plugin 4.
From your new site structure to URLs
Once youve created your new site structure, you can go forth and create
the URLs for this structure. Each pages URL should describe the content
of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what
keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important
ones in your URLs.
37
Keep in mind the following things while implementing your
new URLs
If youre using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.
Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-go, as Unix and Linux servers
are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the
possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/
LiKe/ThiS/ ?
Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remem-
bering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will
remember it and link to it is smaller dont use numbers in URLs.
Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs
they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.
Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents
using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this
way search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the
new one. For example, make sure http://example.com 301 redirects to
http://www.example.com, or the other way around, so people always
link to the same version of your site.
Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for
example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. Theres no
valid reason anymore to have a diferent page for printing purposes
because all major browsers support print stylesheets.
38
Chapter 6
Technical SEO
Introduction
In chapter 4 we have learned how to do a proper keyword research.
You now know what terms people use when searching for your site. In
chapter 5 we came up with a site structure and an internal linking struc-
ture. The next step is making sure that Google can index our website
properly and rank our site when people use these search terms. In this
SEO chapter we will give the very basics of the technical aspects of SEO.
If you have a WordPress website, making your website SEO friendly is not
that hard. WordPress itself is reasonably search engine friendly, as it
supports search engine friendly URLs and its default themes output
proper HTML. Our WP SEO plugin takes care of the rest. Still, there are
some major conditions your site requires to meet. Not meeting these
conditions would make ranking in Google impossible. In this chapter, we
will discuss those requirements. On yoast.com you will fnd numerous
articles which dive much deeper into technical SEO as we do in this
chapter. This chapter is the most nerdy chapter in this book. It could be
a bit too hard if your development skills are limited. We tried to explain
everything as comprehensible as possible and give lots of tips for further
reading.
39
Three stages in SEO
At Yoast, we distinguish several stages in technical SEO. First of all, you
have to make sure that Google is able to index your site (we refer to this
as crawlability). There should be no boundaries that prevent Google and
other search engines from fnding your content or circumstances that
block Google from spidering your content. The second step you have to
take is to investigate whether Google knows which content there is and
that Google can it reach it. We refer to this as fndability. Only the last step
is the actual optimization: what does Google see, how does it rank that
and what can we do about improving how Google ranks it. This last step
will be discussed in more detail in chapter 7.
Crawlability
A condition for your website to rank in Google is that Google can crawl
through your site. No crawling, means no saving of your site in the index
(see chapter 3) and thus no ranking. A quick way of checking whether a
page on your site can be spidered is by doing a quix SEO check. Simply
go to the quix SEO check page, enter the URL and check the results. If its
not green, youve got stuf to fx!
Having a site which Google does not crawl (sufciently) could have several
causes. You could be:
1 blocking the specifc URL with your robots.txt;
2 blocking Google through noindex tags;
3 blocking Google because the canonical is wrong.
The quix SEO check will check all these three causes.
40
1Robots.txt
Every website should have the fle robots.txt. If you do not created such
a fle yourself, WordPress will generate one for you. Robots.txt is a very
powerful fle, which indicates which sections of your site are blocked from
robots including Google. Its not uncommon at all that if a developer
moves your new site from a development server to yours, copying the
robots.txt along, that he / she forgets to update it, leaving your site
blocked from crawling.
Testing a change to your robots.txt is easy: in Google Webmaster Tools
under Crawl Blocked URLs there are two textareas. The frst contains
your robots.txt, you can just edit it to test your change. In the textarea
below that you can specify URLs that should be tested. Hit Test below that
and you should get the all clear.
Yoast Tip
If not, modify and test again. If you dont know how to use Google
Webmaster Tools, start reading here.
2Noindex tags
Sometimes people want some pages not to be indexed by Google. Maybe
you do not want your personal blog in the search results, but you do
want to show it on your website. You can use a noindex tag in the HTML
in order to keep Google from indexing your site. However, sometimes
these tags are written in pages where they should not have been.
41
Perhaps a noindex tag was added by a developer while working on your
site and was forgotten afterwards. The tag looks like this:
<meta name=robots value=noindex,follow />
A noindex tag on a page results to no saving of this page in Googles
index. This page will not rank in Google on any search terms. You want
that meta robots tag to read:
<meta name=robots value=index,follow />
The follow part in the tag tells a search engine that all links on your page
should be followed by the search engine for further indexing of your
website. If you dont specify any meta robots tags (most pages on the web
dont), the default is for that page to allow both indexation and following,
so the default is index,follow.
3Wrong canonical
If you have two pages holding the same content, thats problematic for
your rankings. To fx this problem, Google introduced the canonical link.
Matt Cutts explains this in this video. The basics are that a canonical link
is used to indicate to Google which page you would like Google to display
in the search results.
A canonical link should thus be used when two pages have the same
content. For instance, if you have two URLs that have the same (or 95%
the same) content, it would be benefcial to use a canonical link from
the duplicate page to the main page (you can do this with WordPress
SEO). If you dont know which one is the canonical one: pick one. Not
doing anything is more hurtful than just picking one.
42
The problem comes when youre setting the canonical wrong. This could
occur for instance by inserting a link to a 404 page or simply a non-existing
URL in that canonical link. Also, if your canonical link refers to a page
which is actually very diferent from the original page, Google will get
confused and your ranking may reduce as well. So make sure you use the
correct canonical links. Its a powerful tool, use it wisely.
Findability
Now that weve made sure Google can index your site, its time to tell Google
where the content is. To do that, we rely on two things: links to each page
on our website, which have been taken care of by the internal link structure
we made in chapter 5. Your sites structure determines whether a search
engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will fnd and
index content relevant for your site. Findability can be increased by other
technical aspects as well. We will discuss the most important ones: XML
sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, related links & breadcrumbs.
XML sitemaps
XML sitemap contains a list of all the URLs of your website and keeps track
of its latest updates. The XML sitemap thus gives Google a kind of table of
content of your website. The XML sitemap are strictly meant for search
engines. They adhere to a standard created by the 3 big search engines
Yahoo!, Google and Bing, which you can fnd on sitemaps.org if you want
to see it. The good news is, if youre using WordPress, all you have to do is
install our WordPress SEO plugin and make sure XML sitemaps are
enabled within it. Our plugin will take care of the rest.
43
Whenever you publish a new or update an existing post or page, the
XML sitemap is then automatically updated and the search engines are
notifed of this change in the XML sitemap. They will then fetch the XML
sitemap, see what changed and fetch the changed pages. This means
indexation of your content is sped up incredibly.
Do realize that for pages to rank, they need links. At a minimum, they
need internal links from your site, but if a page is important, it should
probably get high quality external links as well (see chapter 8 about link
building).
HTML sitemaps
Even if youve done the best possible job of creating a good internal link
structure, it can still be helpful to create an HTML sitemap that allows
visitors to get an overview of all the content on your site. If your site is
very big, you might need to split this up into several sitemaps to make it
workable.
The beneft to the search engines is that this page will make sure that no
page on your site is orphaned. every page has at least one link to it,
allowing search engines to rank it.
Related links
Another proven method of making sure search engines can fnd links to
the content on your site is by adding related links to posts and pages.
Most web hosts dont really like the related links plugins available for Word-
Press because theyre rather resource intensive for the server to run.
44
Yoast Tip
We recommend to use Post Connector (by former Yoast developer
Barry Kooij) to solve this problem.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs show the path people take when they click through your
site. They are often visualised on the top of a page so visitors can see how
they navigated. A breadcrumbs path could be Home Clothes Dresses.
Using breadcrumbs will allow Google to easily grasp the structure of
your site and this could well result in higher ranking.
Content optimization
The third and fnal stage in SEO is optimization. Now were sure that
search engines can fnd our content, its time to write copy. In writing and
structuring your text, you can actually help with indexing your page even
further. Good web copy makes sure that it is both readable and useful to
visitors as well as easy to rank for search engines. So you need all the
knowledge youve gathered about keyword research and then apply that
to your text. In the next chapter we will give you some tips on how to do
just that.
45
Chapter 7
SEO copywriting
Introduction
The text on your website is a very important factor in Googles algorithm.
Google spiders your text and indexes the relevant words. Your text should
thus be written in such a way that your keywords and search terms have
a prominent place. However, using your keywords too often severely
damages the readability of your text. In this chapter, we will give some
practical tips and teach you the basics of SEO copywriting.
Yoast Tip
If you want to read more about SEO copywriting, CopyBlogger is the
go to source.
Writing your text
Think before you write
Copywriting is a true profession. It can be quite hard. And copywriting in
order to optimize your website for search engines makes the job even
harder. Make sure the mission of your product (see chapter 4) is crystal
clear. Write it down. Think hard about the message of your text. What do
you want to tell your readers? And what is the purpose of your text? What
do you want you readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the
answers to these questions before you begin writing.
46
Use your keywords wisely
Of course, the keywords and search terms you want to be found on will
have a prominent place in your text. But make sure that you dont use
these search terms too often. If you want to rank for a certain term - say
childrens clothes - and you write a text which has the words childrens
clothes in every sentence, chances are big that your audience will be
pretty annoyed. Your text just isnt readable anymore. Keep in mind that
Google wants to facilitate its users. Users want texts that are understand-
able, well structured and easy to read.
As a general rule of thumb: try to put down your search terms in about
1 to 2 percent of your text. Make sure your articles have a minimum of
300 words. So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search
terms 3 to 6 times. The minimum of 300 words isnt an exact science,
of course, nor is the amount of keyword mentions, but 300 is a decent
minimum number of words for an article that needs to show authority.
Use of subheadings
If you write longer texts and want people to fnd their way in your articles,
you should use subheadings. Headings help Google to grasp the main
topics of a long post and thus can help in your ranking. Use of subhead-
ings will probably let you get away with using the keyword less. Subheadings
will lead people, help them scan your page, and make the structure of
your articles that much clearer. Make sure that your keywords are used in
the subheadings, but do not put your keyword in every subheading (as it
will make the text unreadable). You can read more about headings in one
of Michiels posts.
47
Yoast Tip
Make sure you add pictures or illustrations to your text which ft the
content of your story. When you put a picture in your article, always
try to add an alt tag (containing your keyword) that is still descriptive
of the image.
Beware of over-optimization
Over-optimization in your copywriting can result in Google thinking youre
trying too hard. Google will then push your website down in the search
results. Always keep your audience in mind and write texts that are aimed
at your audience and easy to read.
Content writing with the WP SEO plugin
Our WP SEO plugin actually helps you to write a SEO-friendly text. If you
want the help of our plugin you should start by choosing your focus
keyword and entering it in the appropriate box. This is the most important
search term you want people to fnd this particular page for. Our plugin
actually measures many aspects of the text you are writing and helps with
making your text SEO-friendly. We will describe the most important ones:
1 The plugin allows you to formulate a meta-description. This description
has to be a short text which indicates the main topic of the page. If the
meta-description contains the search term people use, the exact text
will be shown by Google underneath your URL in the search results.
48
2 The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch reading
ease score, which indicates the readability of your article. The Flesch
reading ease score for example takes into account the length of
sentences.
3 The plugin does a pretty big number of checks. It checks whether or not
you used your keyword in 5 important locations: the article-heading,
the title of the page, the URL of the page, the content of the article and
the meta-description. The plugin also checks the presence of links in
your article and the presence of images in the article. It calculates the
number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in the
article. Above that, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages
on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from
competing with yourself.
If you write a text which is relatively SEO friendly (based on the aspects
mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Writing
pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages
on your website.
Keeping your site up to date
There are many myths around having to keep your site updated for
Google. It thus is not entirely clear whether regularly updating your
website leads to a higher ranking in Google. But our advice is simple:
make sure that you regularly work on your website.
Adding an article regularly to your website will do the trick, which is why a
blog is very useful. Adding actual and functional information to your
49
website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it is not an
active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less
appealing to Google to include the page in the search results. Next to
that, make sure you keep your cornerstone content up to date (see
chapter 4).
50
Chapter 8
Link building
Introduction
Competitiveness of niche
In chapter 3 we divided the factors infuencing Googles algorithm in two
categories. First, we distinguished on-page factors, which included, among
others, content and internal linking structure. And second, we distin-
guished of-page factors. Of-page factors are very hard to infuence. The
niche of your business is an of-page factor. If your company operates in
the travel-industry, the competition to rank in Google is high. Other niches
are much less competitive, making ranking of your website that much
easier.
Links from other website
The most important of-page factor that helps with your ranking are links
from other websites. We know that your website will rank better if you
have more links. So, to optimize your website for search engines, it would
be very wise to collect as many high quality links to your site as possible.
How does a link help the ranking your site?
A link to your site helps in the ranking in four ways:
It adds value to the receiving page, allowing it to improve its visibility in
the search engines.
51
It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that
domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of
the website and more specifcally the receiving page.
People click on links, resulting in so called direct trafc.
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 diferent topic. On top of that, a link from within an article is worth
way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more
links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth. Read more
about how link building works in Joosts link building article.
Bad reputation
In recent years link building has gotten a somewhat nasty reputation.
Once people noticed that links from other sites resulted in higher rankings,
they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that did not have any
relation with their own site. In other cases, people bought links from other
sites. Buying links polluted the search engine. Not the best information,
but the people who buy most links would rank high in Google if buying
links would be allowed. That is why Google gives penalties to companies
who buy links or (mis)use links from non-related companies. If you get a
penalty from Google, your site will disappear from the search results. The
bad reputation of link building comes from companies who were a bit too
enthusiastic in link building and got penalties from Google. Does this
mean that you shouldnt do any link building at all? Of course not!
52
Link building the right way
Donts
When you decide to improve your ranking by doing some link building,
make sure you never pay for links. Never use services of companies that
tell you they can get you some links. If the links your website gets are from
sites that are unreliable (e.g. if there are only advertisements on the site),
you should get rid of them.
Its very important to keep in mind that if a link will never get natural clicks,
from people reading an article and clicking through, its not going to be a
very valuable link. Search engines are getting better and better at under-
standing which links truly connect the web and which are just there to
fool the search engine.
Outreaching PR-activity
Link building is an outreaching PR-activity. Link building should generate
visitors to your site that actually ft your site. As long as you are doing
nothing more than asking people to write about your awesome product,
it is perfectly OK. This could really increase your rankings. Link building
should feel like a normal marketing activity and not like a trick. But be
aware that link building this way takes a lot of time and it will continue
to take time. It does not have to be a hard or awkward activity. If your
product is good, there will be more than enough people who would like
to blog about it. Most bloggers need content, thus presenting your
product to them will make them happy!
53
Guest Blogging
Activities like guest blogging are nice link building activities as well. Guest
blogging has gotten quite some negative press in 2014. A large guest blog-
ging network was penalized by Google and the general SEO tendency
seemed to be to advise against guest blogging. This blogging network, in
the eyes of Google, abused guest blogging to create links.
The bottom line is that guest blogging as such can be good for your
rankings, if you do this occasionally and select the right websites for it. It
shouldnt be a blog post just to be linked on that website. If your posts
actually fts the guest blog and contributes to the website than its perfectly
OK. If youre going to do it at scale and reproduce the same content all
the time: that wont work.
Yoast Tip
Paddy Moogan has written an e-book about link building that we fnd
is one of the most comprehensive on the topic. Get it here.
54
Search Engine Optimization
Further reading
In this section, we have taught you the basics of Search Engine Optimi-
zation. If you want to know more about SEO we recommend you to read
our WordPress SEO article: The defnitive guide to higher rankings for
WordPress sites. On yoast.com we post blogs on a regular basis with
information and tips on SEO. Read our posts on SEO!

Section
Navigation
by Michiel Heijmans
56
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of a good navigation. Navigation
is everything that has to do with guiding your visitors through your
website. You should help your visitors to fnd what they look for at your
site. In the previous section, we have told you the basics of attracting
people to your website. In this section, we will teach you how to help
people fnd what they look for once they are actually on your website! This
section contains a number of chapters in which we go over your website
from top to bottom. In this journey well stop at every navigational elements
we encounter and share our thoughts on this option. Sometimes we will
include insight from SEO, or efects on user experience, for using that
option. Finally, we have also included a few remarks on navigation on your
mobile website.
57
Chapter 9
Introduction to navigation
Why do we need navigation?
Imagine yourself being lost. Being lost without knowing how far you have
to travel. Without any sense of where you are and especially no sense of
where you need to go. Thats probably how your visitor will feel when your
website would lack any navigational features.
Many navigational elements
Luckily every website seems to have some kind of navigation. Navigational
features are not limited to your menu and submenu. There are many ways
of navigating through your website, although we do not label these as
such. In fact, we recommend making your menu as short as possible, and
trust the visitor will fnd the other ways to navigate your website. Under-
stand that every internal link on your website helps the visitor navigate.
That could be a single link in your text, your breadcrumbs or a footer link.
But it could also be a list of categories in your sidebar.
A top-down approach of your navigation
In this section we will analyze your navigational features, based upon an
imaginary map of your web page. This map is based upon the default
layout of a website, using a header, content area, right sidebar and a
footer. We will refer to those as respectively North, West, East and South.
58
Figure 7: imaginary map of your web page.
Travelling your website
In Jonathan Swifts well-known novel Gullivers Travels (1726), we fnd a
man that is lost at sea after shipwrecking. That totally resembles Daniel
Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719), with one major diference: Robinson
had nowhere to go but the Island of Despair, while Gulliver travels on to
end up on four diferent locations before fnally heading home. Fun fact is
that Gulliver visited the island with Yahoos last, where everybody is using
Google now.
On your website, you just want Gullivers, not Robinsons. Everybody that
gets lost on your website, should have a clear and visible escape route to
59
get to the next island, right? There are a lot of ways to give that visitor
directions to navigate your website, and while we discuss a lot of these in
this section were sure youll be able to come up with more. The following
chapters are meant to make you recognise and use the navigational
options your site has, to improve your user experience, usability and SEO
along the way.
60
Chapter 10
Top menu navigation: coming in from
the North
Now lets imagine a visitor travelling over
your web page, entering from the upper
left the North - of your browser.
The Back button
One of the most clicked features in a
browser is probably the Back button of
the browser itself. If we end up on a page
where we cant fnd what we are looking
for, a simple click will bring us back to a
page we already know. Its as simple as that. The quickest escape from
an un wanted situation.
Unfortunately, the Back button is not something we can control. The use
of it however clearly tells us that we need clear crossroads in our website.
We need to have pages that redirect us to other sections of the website.
A page is never a dead end, there should always be a way back.
61
Yoast Tip
Make sure your visitors cant get lost. Make sure that every page
has a clear escape to get back to the previous page and to the
homepage.
Top navigation
We refer to the navigation options entirely on top of your website (above
your main menu) as top navigation. The top navigation is often over-
looked, but provides valuable background information for your website.
Some websites include home and contact links in the top navigation.
These are actually often a bit too important to put in your top navigation.
You would want a more prominent place for these.
When dividing your website in topics, you will fnd yourself left with a
number of menu items that do not ft the main menu (more on that later)
in any way. Lets mention a few to make this more clear:
Support
Documentation
How-to Register
RSS Feedback
Contact
Terms
Sitemap
Search
Login
All these links are candidates for your top navigation. These are the links
we need, not the links we need to focus on.
62
Logo
Most websites give a prominent place to their logo somewhere in the
north. This is your unique feature, your lighthouse. There is no page on
your website that is not branded with your logo, if youve set up your web
pages the right way.
Logo links to homepage
It would be a wasted navigational option not to link that logo. Even on
your sales pages, where you may have reduced all noise by getting rid of
your main menu, the logo lighthouse will provide a nice, warm link back to
your homepage. Every ship lost at sea will then fnd its way back to that
safe harbor.
Trinity
Sometimes people make the mistake to link the logo to another page
than the homepage. Do not make that mistake! The logo should always
link to your homepage. It is part of a trinity; the first item in the main
menu, the first item in breadcrumbs and the logo. All these three
should always link to your homepage. It will be the lifeline for the
drowning visitor. Grab on to one of these and find yourself back on the
homepage.
Main menu
At this point we are crossing a border from our most northern territory
to the main section of our web page. That border, the main navigation,
63
is also called your global navigation. Its not always a horizontal naviga-
tion and its not always global, but that is just one of the terms introduced
to indicate the main menu on your website. Other names are top-level,
persistent or primary navigation. But in the end its your main menu,
right?
The main menu indicates the various sections of your website in a clear
and informative way. That global navigation should consist of a number
(not too much) main menu items that tell the visitor which corner of
your website should be visited for what information. In chapter 5 we
already gave practical insights in structuring your website. Your main
menu should refect the structure of your website. Do not food the
menu with unrelated items but think about which categories make
sense to your visitors.
Submenu
The submenu should contain details of the main menu item. When the
main item is Apple, the submenu should read something like iPhone,
iPad, Mac, iTunes. Note that these submenu items should also be present
on the Apple page.
There are many ways to add a submenu, the most common is where the
submenu drops down below the main menu item when hovering your
mouse over that item.
64
Figure 8: a submenu which drops down when hovering your
mouse over the main menu item. The downwards pointing
arrow shows a submenu exist.
Yoast Tip
Add an indication (like a downwards pointing arrow) in your main
menu item to show that it contains a submenu. Otherwise, visitors
will not know that a submenu exists!
65
Chapter 11
Navigation in main content:
the Wild West
Main content
When we travel down from the North, going
counterclockwise, we enter the Wild West.
This is where the magic happens, some will
say. In a default website layout, this is
indeed your main content area. This is
where your company information is, or
where we will fnd your blog posts.
The main content (or the wild west) might
just be the most overlooked part of your
website when it comes to links and naviga-
tional options for your website. Yet there are many ways to ofer navigation
here. The navigational options are not always prominent or obvious, but
without even knowing it yourself, this is where you can most easily guide
your visitor.
As the visitor has already decided on reading that specifc page, what
would be more easy than ofer related content in that main part of your
website as well? In this chapter, we will give you some navigational options
to use in the main content part of your site.
66
Breadcrumbs
Youll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Bread-
crumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like: Home
WordPress WordPress Plugins. They are good for two things. First of all,
they allow your users to easily navigate through your site. And secondly,
they allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more
easily.
These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category
the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one.
Yoast Tip
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin actually helps you to create bread-
crumbs fairly easy.
Make sure your website has a nice internal structure, like discussed in
chapter 5. We often hear people say things like: My website only has two
layers: home and the page at hand. So breadcrumbs are useless. Our ques-
tion in this case would immediately be: Why havent you structured your
content a bit better? Breadcrumbs make valuable internal links, and
provide a simple, structural navigation. If your website has multiple levels
of content, you want breadcrumbs.
67
Yoast Tip
Breadcrumbs improve the navigation of your site, but are valuable
for SEO as well.
On-page navigation
At Yoast, we dont mind scrolling. We love long, textual content. If you
want to be the authority on a subject, you should be able to write a whole
lot about it. Thats also how Google will see this. If you want a page to
rank with three lines of text, even Google will smile and give you lower
rankings for the page or not rank you at all (see also chapter 7 on SEO
copy writing).
Now with long pages, there is a simple way to improve usability of that
page: by adding on-page navigation. Just create links that refer to a place
in the article below. At yoast.com, we use this for instance for our main
SEO for WordPress article. There is actually quite a lengthy index on that
page. An added beneft is that the anchors on the page itself allow us to
link directly to a chapter on that page.
Teaser blocks/Call-to-action blocks
When making a list of navigational options, we almost forgot teaser
blocks. Teaser blocks are not the frst things that come to mind when listing
navigational options. Were not even sure that is the right terminology for
these blocks, but calling them teasers seems to cover their purpose.
68
These blocks populate your homepage or sidebar and have a distinct
navigational use. As secondary calls-to-action, for instance, they guide the
visitor to the green meadows of your website: your main or money pages.
Teaser blocks actually work very well. We sometimes wonder why web-
sites that sell a product or service are using Google Adsense to make an
extra buck instead of creating nice, appealing product banners that lure
the visitor to the right sales page. Why use valuable space on your website
for another product than your own?
Yoast Tip
New templates, such as templates from StudioPress or Woo -
Themes, and our own WordPress Themes, reserve space for these
teasers. Where old themes were mainly about sliders and widgets,
new themes seem to take calls-to-action and textual teasers in
account. When wireframing your new design, add these
teaser-blocks.
Pagination
People do not want to click through an endless collection of posts.
Suppose your blog has 1,000 articles and youre listing 10 articles per
page, that would give you a hundred archive pages. If you would link these
pages just by adding an Older (Previous) posts link and a Newer (Next)
posts link, that would mean you would have to click 99 times to get to the
last page. There is no need to make it that hard.
69
By adding a numbered pagination, linking for instance the frst, second,
third, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, up to the ninetieth and last page, you
would reduce that number of clicks to fve. Jumping every 20 pages will
already lower that number to 10, of course. Pagination will allow your
users to click through your archive in a rather simple way.
Figure 9: you dont want to click each page to get
to page 50.
Figure 10: you should be able to skip pages.
Categorizing and tagging your content
WordPress ofers the possibility to create structure while writing your
posts. It has two ways of doing this: you can use categories and you can
use tags. The diference is that categories are hierarchical, so you can
have sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, whereas tags are unstruc-
tured. You can compare the categories to the table of contents of your
website, and tags as the Index.
Both of these are called taxonomies within the WordPress world and you
could add more of them if you wanted to. Category and tag themselves
dont convey much meaning. But if you added another taxonomy called
Region, itd be immediately obvious that those should hold all the keywords
related to the location of the article. You could add this as a hierarchical
taxonomy and create a Continent Country Region structure, or you
70
could make it free form (tags). Both have their benefts, but choose wisely,
as changing from one to the other is a painful process.
At Yoast, we prefer using categories for high level topic specifcation and
tags for more specifc topic specifcation. So SEO is a category, XML site-
map or HTML sitemap would be a tag. If you use these taxonomies in a
recognizable way, people will use them to navigate your website if theyre
looking for a specifc topic. And that was our goal, wasnt it?
Make taxonomies visible!
A lot of people forget to make their taxonomies visible to a visitor. What
would be the use of these taxonomies in that case? So your posts are
nicely archived for yourself? That would be a waste of that taxonomy. In
some themes, the categories and tags are instantly shown as you add
them to your post. But, some themes neglect to do so. You should make
sure these tags and categories are in fact shown, preferably at the bottom
of your article.
Taxonomies can go wrong!
A lot could go wrong with taxonomies when people start using them
randomly. The structure of your taxonomies is important. As taxonomies
group your content, you should keep in mind where these could be used,
how they are used and where they are linked. Do not create too many
categories. Do not create too many tags. Make sure tags are used more
than once or twice.
71
Yoast Tip
Dont go creating a list of categories longer than Rapunzels hair. That
will mean you have probably gone overboard creating categories.
We usually recommend eight to ten categories. If you need more,
you might consider adding more taxonomies, not categories. If half
of your categories is about people, why not add a People taxonomy
instead.
72
Chapter 12
Sidebar: in the East
For the visitor that is still lost after going
over the top and left sides of your
website, the right of your (default) website
contains a sidebar that could help him or
her fnd that one page theyre looking for.
The sidebar is suitable for a number of
lists and widgets.
Listings
The sidebar is especially well suited for a
few types of listings. In chapter 11 we already discussed taxonomies,
categories and tags. Taxonomies are great navigational features. People
can easily grasp the structure of your website by navigating through your
taxonomies. A list of your categories could also be added to your sidebar
providing this list is not too long. Adding a list with 100 categories in your
sidebar, would be plain stupid. Please keep the total number of links per
page around 50 max. That might seem a bit low for your website, but if
you keep your menu short and focussed and do not add a surplus of
unnecessary links to your sidebar and footer, youll really have to push to
get 50 links on that page.
73
Recent posts
A recent post widget is a great way to remind your visitors you also have
a blog and tell them about all the latest things you have written. It really
doesnt matter if these posts are company related or deal with market
insights. If you frequently update your blog (or news section), that recent
posts section in your sidebar will be flled with interesting reading mate-
rial for your visitors.
Recent comments
If you have an active blog, and you invite your visitors to comment on your
posts, a recent comments section could also be valuable. If youve built an
active community around your website or brand, comments could be a
way for the community to make themselves heard.
Yoast Tip
A recent comments widget can be very helpful! People might
comment on a post using keywords they use themselves in search,
which might help you rank for these as well or at least invite you to
vary your keyword use with these alternatives. But comments might
also give you ideas for new posts. Showing you have an active
community will entice others to visit your blog section as well.
74
Teasers and banners
The sidebar probably contains a lot more links or more teasers. These
could for instance be banners for your own products you sell on our
website.
Search option
If your website has over twenty nice, long pages, there will need to be a
search option. This search form should either be in the top of your side-
bar, or in your header. We tend to prefer the top of the sidebar. We also
recommend saving a prominent spot for your search option on your 404
page. When lost, you can fnd what you are looking for.
Search result page
Adding a search option to your website does come with the responsibility
to create great search result pages as well. Unfortunately this is often
overlooked. Just adding the WordPress search functionality does not
provide you with these great search result pages (nor the best results, to
be honest).
Yoast Tip
Plugins like Relevanssi or WP Search for instance order posts by
relevancy instead of date (WordPress default) and highlight the
keyword that was used in the text snippet below the title in search
result pages.
75
Chapter 13
Footer: in the South
The footer of your website is for all the
information that is not your main content,
but should be listed on your website. No,
lets rephrase that: There are two types of
footers, the one with just the copyright
and some extra links, and footers that
contain footer blocks with information.
That information can be an address, a
short contact form, payment options or
quality and security marks. But there most
probably will also be links.
Footer links
What not to do?
When adding links to your footer, always wonder if that link deserves to be
tucked away in that footer. Repeating your main menu items for instance.
Now why would you want to do that? Your menu is already on that page
and if you want that menu to be available for the visitor that scrolled all
the way down, why not simply stick that menu to the top of the browser?
Hence the name sticky menu. When we decided to build themes, the
(mobile and) sticky menu were the frst things we decided these themes
should have. Its just very convenient to have that menu present at all
76
times. Repeating the menu in the footer seems a bit silly, to be honest.
Why sacrifce that space to repeat something that is already on your site.
Figure 11: sticky menu
What to do?
It would make sense to list your categories, recent posts or comments,
for instance when there is no sidebar in your design. You just have to
make sure these footer links are useful for the visitor. When in doubt, the
link probably isnt useful.
Common links that we fnd in footers are of course terms of delivery,
copyright links, perhaps another link to your contact page. Besides asking
yourself if that link should be added, also ask yourself if that link needs
to pass on link juice to the next page. Add a rel=nofollow to that terms
of delivery link. That page does not need to rank anyway. These links can
be found in the larger footer area with blocks, or in the fnal line of your
website, right after the copyright statement.
HTML sitemap
The footer is also a good place to link to your HTML sitemap. There should
be an HTML sitemap available when your website exceeds about 20
77
pages. Your HTML sitemap lists all the pages and posts on your website.
If you structure your HTML sitemap into clear sections for pages and
posts and more, the sitemap could be a visitors last resort. When even
search fails, the HTML sitemap could be used to fnd that related post, or
the category you did not list in your sidebar.
For Google, that HTML sitemap is nice to get to all your pages, but you
probably already presented it with an XML sitemap as well, right? In that
case, the focus in the HTML sitemap should really be on making it a user
friendly document that could start the journey all over again.
78
Chapter 14
Mobile website
Now that we have travelled the entire website map, we are left with that
one island that remains: the mobile website.
Yoast Tip
Make sure your links are clickable on a mobile phone. Were not just
referring to your telephone number. If, for instance, your sidebar
contains a list of categories, make sure one can click one link at a
time, and the sidebar is not crammed with links, so clicking one is
nearly impossible without zooming. There needs to be sufcient
white space around that link.
Mobile menu
We all know that hamburger icon, adding that as a substitute for your
menu seems logical: its a space saver. Most menus drop down to the
bottom, but some fold out to the left or right. The main advantage of the
left menu is that you can use the entire height of the screen for the navi-
gation, where for instance the much used TwentyTwelve theme by
WordPress has this drop down menu below the logo/site name, meaning
there is less vertical space to use for the menu. On the other hand, that
might help you to keep your menu short and focused.
79
Hamburger
icon
Figure 12: Hamburger menu;
drop down to the bottom
Figure 13: TwentyTwelve: drop
down menu below logo/name
TwentyTwelve actually does not use that hamburger image for the menu.
It just uses the word Menu. That does seem to make more sense than the
hamburger icon in the middle of your website!
Your mobile menu should stay focused, especially when your website
also has a drop down menu. Consider creating great landing pages for
your main menu items and just forget about the submenu for your mobile
website. It will be more convenient to focus on mobile search instead.
Mobile search
Perhaps the most important navigational option for a mobile website is
the search option. If you have a huge website with hundreds of pages or
80
more, why bother listing all these pages in a menu when a visitor could
just search for it in a second after arriving on your website? Make sure
the search option is clearly visible in either your mobile top bar or simply
in the website itself.
In-text links
Finally we would like to mention the links within your texts itself. We have
seen websites that have added extra padding (whitespace) around these
links as well. And why shouldnt you? Thumb-thickness is a factor in how
useful these links are on a mobile websites. Also take line height in
account.

+
Figure 14: two examples of line height
81
Navigation
Further reading
In this section we have taught you how to help your visitors through your
site. If you want to read more about Navigation and Usability, check out
yoast.com. We wrote a whole bunch of blog posts on Usability.
82
Section
Sales
by Thijs de Valk
83
About this section
In the previous sections we taught you the basics of SEO and of how to
help your visitors navigate through your website. In this section we will
explain how to get sales from your website and well guide you in improv-
ing your webshop. We will use insights from psychology which are useful
in directing your visitors and give some tips about what you should think
about to close the deal. In the frst chapter, we will give practical tips you
can use to easily improve the sales of your website. In the next and fnal
chapter of this section we will specifcally look at the checkout process.
84
Chapter 15
Making money with your website
Creating a shop
A WordPress site can easily be transformed in a webshop. There are
numerous plugins that add the functionality you need to make your
website a webshop. We would recommend to use either Woocommerce
or Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) to create your shop.
WooCommerce
If you have, or want to start, a webshop selling physical product,
Woo Commerce is defnitely the way to go. This plugin instantly converts
your WordPress based website to a shop and is fairly easy to use. This
free plugin makes it easy to display your products, adds the functionality
you need to let your customers pay for their stuf and helps you to manage
your inventory.
Yoast Tip
Easily combine your WooCommerce webshop and our WordPress
SEO plugin with our Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin, making sure
your webshop ranks in the search engines.
Easy Digital Downloads
If, instead of physical products, youre selling digital products, we would
recommend Easy Digital Downloads. This plugin might not look as pretty,
85
but it ofers a boatload of addons that make sure you can alter every-
thing you want. Were actually using Easy Digital Downloads ourselves at
yoast.com.
The goal of your webshop
Before you can start selling anything on your website, youll have to have
a very clear picture of what it is you want to do with your website. We have
already covered this in chapter 4 concerning keyword research. Before
you do anything, you should write down your mission! 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 ofering exactly?
Do not think too lightly of this. It is really hard to have (and keep) clearly
in mind what it is you want to do. To show you, weve made a list of
questions you should be able to answer after youve thought it all through:
What is your core business?
What can people do with the products / services youre selling on your
website?
Why should people buy your products / services?
How will your products / services enhance your clients lives?
Why should people buy the products / services on your website and
not on an other (f.i. cheaper or better known) website?
Whats the reason youre ofering these products / services, besides
making money?
86
You should be able to answer all these questions quickly, clearly and
succinctly. Having an answer to these questions means you have a clear
idea of what it is you want. And you really need to have that idea clear,
before you can start selling it! People will simply not buy anything from
you, if your idea is not clear. People just dont like vague products or
shops.
Especially the last question in the summary is a hard one to answer. Most
people so quickly jump on the fnancial bandwagon, saying they want to
make lots of money. We urge you to think beyond that and really think
about what youre ofering and why. Because if you dont believe in your
own products or services, theres no chance your potential customers will.
Funneling your visitors: conversion rate
optimization
In the previous sections youve learnt how you can get as much trafc as
possible to your website (section SEO) and how to make your website
easily navigable for these visitors (section Navigation). In this chapter
well show you how to direct your visitors to the places you want them
to go. Thats whats we call funneling: guiding your visitors towards a
desired end point. You are aiming to convert your visitors to a sale. In
the feld of sales, people often talk about conversions or conversion
rates. A high conversion rate means that many visitors on your website
actually buy a product. Conversion means that you turn a visitor into a
paying customer or a returning visitor. Conversion rates are usually very
low (often lower than 1 percent). Trying to increase your conversion is
87
known as conversion rate optimization. In this chapter we will give you
some tips how to optimize your conversion. At Yoast, we also ofer
Conversion Reviews in which we analyze your entire webshop and give
loads of tips how to optimize your conversion. In chapter 19 we will give
more detailed information about conversion rate optimization.
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.
If you have a webshop the call-to-action would link directly to your shop.
The text on the call-to-action would then say something like Shop Now. Such
a button would instantly make clear to visitors what kind of website it is.
Figure 15: a clear call-to-action on www.cheapair.com
88
Youll 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
doesnt stand out is at risk of visitors completely missing it. And if people
miss it, it obviously wont call anyone to action. Make your call-to-action
stand out by giving it a bright color you havent used in your website yet.

+
Figure 16: two examples of a call-to-action button
Product pages
Visitors should become more and more informed about your product
when theyre moving towards your product page. If youre selling physical
products, you should try to make it as much as the real thing as you can.
What are the odds youd buy a product in a physical shop based on a
piece of paper with a small picture and sloppy description?
You should attempt to mimic the experience of viewing and turning a
product in a store. Make sure people can decently view your product.
Ofer 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 viewing and turning a product in
a store.
89
Figure 17: video and images from all angles on amazon.com
Yoast Tip
Try to create an ambience through your textual and visual content
that evoke the same type of response from your visitors as in the real
store. Such an ambience through text can be achieved by, for
instance, not just describing the product, but describing your own
reaction to it. Approaching your descriptive content this way will give
it a lot more depth and value.
Social proof
Online marketing in many aspects is not that diferent than other types of
marketing. In trying to convince people to buy your stuf, you can use the
insights from social psychology and marketing. What infuences people?
We know that other people are a very important factor in convincing
people to buy or try something. People trust a product a lot more when
other people, preferably friends or people who are similar to themselves,
have told them its good. This principle is called social proof. If you sell
products or services on your website, you can easily use social proof to
your advantage.
90
Testimonials
Have people leave testimonials or reviews on your website and your prod-
ucts. This will work even if your visitors dont know the people that left the
review. You need legitimate testimonials. Make sure your testimonials
look legit. So post as much information with the testimonials as you can
(name, job, picture, etc.). Having decent testimonials and reviews will def-
nitely convince people to click on your call-to-action.
91
Chapter 16
The checkout process
Introduction
In the previous chapter we gave tips how to funnel your visitors through
your website. We also gave some tips how to increase your sales. But
what do you do when people click on your call-to-action button and go to
your checkout process? In this chapter will teach you the basics how to
improve your checkout page.
The last step in your process is always the checkout page; your websites
cash register. Although a lot of your visitors might go here, that doesnt
mean theyll actually buy your products. Make sure youre being clear
enough and ofer them enough feedback and validation so they know
theyre heading the right way. Make them want to complete the order.
Shopping cart abandonment
In the checkout process youll usually still lose a lot of people. These
people do not fnish their sale. This is a bit weird: in a real shop it would
be like people adding items to their basket, going to the counter, letting
you scan all the items and tell them the total price. And then, they would
leave. Without paying, without products. In a physical shop, this does not
happen that often. On the internet, it is quite common. Read more about
shopping cart abandonment in one of Thijs posts. Luckily, there are
quite a few things that can really help you to let your visitors actually
complete their transaction.
92
Progress bar
Make clear to your visitors how far along in the checkout process they
actually are. You can easily do this by adding a progress bar. A progress
bar is a bar, that shows the progress of your visitors! It will give structure
to the process, explaining people how far along they are in the shopping
process. Every step of your checkout process should be in this progress
bar.The progress bar also gamifes the process of buying something. This
means that people want to make it to the end of the process, simply to
reach the end of the progress bar. After completing one step, you should
give a clear pat on the back, like: you have successfully flled out your
address! Make sure that your progress bar shows the steps your visitors
have already completed.

Yoast Tip
Do not make your checkout process to long (5 steps is long enough!).
Gamifying will not work in long checkout processes, people will get
tired of your checkout process then.
Inline validation
Inline validation means that you give your visitors immediate feedback on
whether theyve done the right thing. In your checkout process you could
93
add a check which immediately shows people whether they used a valid
email address, home address or credit card number.
Or not so much:
This will prevent people from making a lot of mistakes and then having to
refll everything. Also, it makes people feel good to get validated. Its a bit
difcult if you cannot write code, but it is defnitely worth it if you have the
technical skills. In you want to read more about inline validation, please
read Joosts post on checkout feld validation tips and tricks.
Increase cache expiration time
Dont you just love it when the shopkeeper still knows your name and
what product(s) you were looking at the day or week before? People love
that same thing with online shops. They want to be able to leave items
sitting in their cart, feeling safe itll still be there later on. About 30% of
people wait for at least 12 hours until they make their purchase. So you
need to make sure youre saving all this data! The best way to do this
would be by increasing the cache expiration time on your checkout pages.
You can read more about caching in chapter 24 about speed.
94
Sales
Further reading
In this section we gave tips about how to make money with your website.
You should now by able to create and optimize your webshop in Word-
Press. At yoast.com, we often write posts about making money with your
website and about Conversion Rate Optimization. These posts are great
options for further reading.

95
Section
Analytics
by Annelieke van den Berg
96
About this section
Oh man, do we love data! We are not just WordPress geeks, we are data
geeks as well. Thats why we are so delighted with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics gives us the opportunity to analyze the number of
visitors on our website. It can give a lot of information on how you can
make your websites even better. In this section wed like to show you
what Google Analytics is, and explain how Google Analytics can help you
improve your website.
97
Chapter 17
What is Google Analytics?
In this chapter well explain how Google Analytics works. In the next
chapter in this section (chapter 18) well explain how you can use the data
Google Analytics provides to improve your website.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a tool that tracks the visitors on your website. It actu-
ally provides insightful statistics of your website. Google Analytics can give
you detailed information about:
How many visitors have been and currently are on your website.
Where those visitors came from.
How much time a visitor spends on your page(s).
Which pages a visitor visits subsequently.
Where and when visitors leave your site.
Page speed.
If your visitors watch a video or download a PDF fle.
How your visitors go through your sales process.
and much more...
How to use Google Analytics
If you want to track your websites statistics, you should start by creating
a Google Analytics account. In order to start tracking your visitors, you
98
have to add a line of Javascript code on every page you want to track. Our
free Google Analytics for WordPress plugin actually takes care of this. It
adds the tracking code to all of your pages. If you want to know all about
this great plugin, just visit this page.
Universal Analytics
Google has launched a new version of Google Analytics in 2013, which is
called Universal Analytics. At Yoast, were already playing and testing with
Universal Analytics. It is a very powerful new way of doing things, which
improves upon the original Google Analytics.
In September 2014 Yoast lauched a new Google Analytics plugin, which
allows for integration with Universal Analytics. You can read more about
our new plugin (and how to switch to Universal Analytics) on our Google
Analytics page at Yoast.com.
Learn from Google Analytics
Although Google Analytics can give you great insights, its usability leaves
quite a bit of room for improvement. People that are new to Google
Analytics can become easily overwhelmed, so well guide you with a step
by step introduction.
Google Analytics has its own academy and YouTube channel, but in our
opinion the fastest way to learn how it works, is simply by going in there.
Youll fnd a lot of useful statistics just by clicking through Google Analytics
and trying some things. You should make sure that youre in the Reporting
tab.
99
Reporting
Figure 18: dashboard Google Analytics Reporting
What kind of statistics does Google Analytics ofer?
Real-Time
After opening Google Analytics, you can choose
to view a number of diferent statistics. In the
sidebar on the left, you can click on Real-Time.
This will show you how many visitors are on
your website right at this moment. You can see
which devices people use (desktop, mobile
phone), which pages are viewed and from which
location your visitors come. Looking at Real-
Time statistics is fun, because you can monitor
how many visitors are at your site and what theyre looking at. But keep in
mind that this is all it is: data on what your visitors are doing right now.
This isnt really useful for anything besides fun, and maybe checking if the
post you just published is getting some immediate visitors.
100
Audience
The next tab in Google Analytics is Audience.
The audience section is Google Analytics
attempt to give you an idea of what kind of
audience your site has. The Demographics and
Interests tabs tell you what gender and age
your visitors are, and what theyre interested
in. However, theres obviously no way Google
Analytics can be sure about whos behind a pc,
tablet or smartphone, so dont read too much
into this.
So lets talk about the useful data you can be
sure about: the Behavior, Technology and Mobile tabs. These tabs tell you
whether a visitors is on your site for the frst time or how many times
theyve been on your site before. And it will tell you what kind of device
and software they used to view your site. This is all information that you
can use to improve your site. For instance, if you have a lot of trafc from
smartphones, youd better have a decent responsive website!
There are two menu items we didnt mention yet: Custom and Users Flow.
The Custom tab is there for any custom dimensions or variables you
mightve made. This is defnitely for more advanced users, so were not
going into it here. The Users Flow can be a great tool to get a general idea
and quick overview of how your visitors move through your site.
101
Yoast Tip
Look at pie charts for a quick and understandable overview.
Acquisition
The Acquisition tab is the tab where you can fnd
out where your visitors are actually coming
from. It gives you all the websites that are refer-
ring to your website, including search engines
such as Google. Google Analytics splits these
referrals into 7 diferent so called Channels:
1 Direct
2 Organic Search
3 Referral
4 Social
5 Display
6 Email
7 (Other)
102
The Direct is exactly that: visitors that type your URL directly into their
browser. Organic Search is all the trafc coming from search engines.
Referrals are all websites referring to your site that arent social media.
Social is for all the trafc coming from social media. Display is for all the
trafc coming from ads you have on other sites. Email is obviously for
trafc coming from email campaigns. And (Other) is for campaigns youve
created yourself.
By organizing it in these channels, you can actually quickly see where
most of your trafc is coming from. For more detailed information,
you can simply click any one of these channels. If you do this with the
Organic Search channel, youll notice the np in front of your URLs. NP
stands for Not Provided, as Google no longer gives you any keyword
data. This means you cant see what people searched for to end up on
that specifc page.
All the other menu items below the Acquisition section are primarily for
advanced users, so we wont go into them here. But do click through them
a bit just to see what else you can fnd!
103
Behavior
The Behavior tab is for all the information
about how your visitors behave on your web-
site. What this means is that it contains all the
information of how your websites visitors
interact with your website. What pages do
they visit consecutively, have they used your
site search, how much time have they spent
waiting for your pages to load, etc. Youll notice
a Behavior Flow thats very similar to the User
Flow we already talked about.
However, the most interesting data will be found under Site Content, Site
Search and In-Page Analytics. The Site Content section will give you a good
idea of which pages attract the most visitors. The pages are ranked by
pageviews by default, with the pages with the most pageviews on top.
These are usually pretty similar to the Landing Pages youll fnd below it.
Below the Landing Pages, youll fnd the Exit Pages. This will give you a list
of pages with the most Exits. Knowing these pages makes it easy to learn
which pages you should focus on when optimizing your website.
The Site Search section gives you insight in what people search for on your
website and where they end up. This can give you a really good idea of
what people are actually looking for and if your website is ofering those
things. If you fnd things that people are searching for, but you dont have
any real content on yet, be sure to add it!
104
One of the cooler things, in our opinion, of Google Analytics is the In-Page
Analytics feature. What this does, is render your website inside Google
Analytics, and it will tell you how many people clicked where. This can give
you great insight in how people are using your website, and if theyre
actually using it the way you thought they were.
Yoast Tip
Google has released a Chrome extension for Page Analytics that
allows instant access to the In-Page Analytics for a page by just
clicking on a button from that page.
Conversion
The last tab in the list in the Conversion tab. When a visitor purchases a
product or subscribes for a newsletter we call these actions conversions
(see chapter 15 on making money with your website and chapter 19 on
A / B-testing). You can track your conversions by setting up goals. If you
have a webshop or any kind of (contact)form and / or email subscription
on your website, setting up goals is the way to go when analyzing your
conversion rate. If you would like to track your conversions you should
105
read Thijs post on setting up goals in Google Analytics. If you still think
setting up goals is a too advanced far for you, we can also do it for you.
Click here for more information.
We wont go into this section further, because its actually for the more
advanced Google Analytics users and requires a lot of extra settings
before anything will show up. However, if you own a webshop, this is
defnitely a section you should be flling with data, because thats
invaluable!
Yoast Tip
If you want to know more about the specifcs of a certain report
in Google Analytics, you can watch the instruction videos Google
Analytics ofers. Weve found them to be really helpful.
106
Chapter 18
Improving your website with Google
Analytics
Introduction
In the previous chapter we have explained how Google Analytics works.
In this chapter, we will show you what you can do with the data Google
Analytics provides. We will give some examples how to use the statistics
of Google Analytics to your advantage. Also, we provide some handy tips
you can use to reduce and analyze the wealth of data you can fnd in
Google Analytics.
Ask questions
Google Analytics provides lots and lots of data. It tracks everything, literally
everything. And everything can sometimes be a bit overwhelming! Just
because Google Analytics tracks everything, does not mean you have to
use or analyze everything. Ask yourself what you want to know about
the visitors on your site. Try to really think about the data you would want
to see (within the possibilities of Google Analytics).
Setting a time frame
The frst thing you need to learn, is actually really simple. You need to
select the time frame for which you want to see the data from your
website. In the top right of every window in Google Analytics (except
107
when youre in the Real-Time section), you will see two dates with a drop-
down. If you drop that window down, this will appear:
Here you can set the time frame that you think is useful. Once you change it,
every section youll be looking at will be rendered for this time frame. You can
go as far back as you want, from a few days to a few years, granted that you
had the Google Analytics tracking code installed on your website. So always
keep this in mind and always be sure you have the right time frame set!
Using flter options
One of the more useful features of Google Analytics, is the flter feature.
With this, you can flter out any noise you dont want to see, so youll end
up with exactly those parts of your trafc you want to be seeing at that
point. On just about any page in Google Analytics, youll see this after
youve clicked the advanced text link:
advanced
108
In here you can choose to include or exclude any number of things. For
example, on yoast.com, if we want to see just the trafc for the / hire-us /
pages, we can simply include any page containing / hire-us / in the URL. This
will automatically exclude any page that doesnt contain / hire-us /. If you
want just one page, such as a subpage of the / hire-us / part, youll need to
be more specifc, for instance: / hire-us / website-review /.
Obviously, if you want to see all the trafc except that of one page or
section of your site, you simply select Exclude instead of Include in the frst
dropdown (see image).
The reason this flter option is so useful, is because Google Analytics
tracks everything thats happening on your site, usually. This means its
also tracking a lot of pages that only get visited once in a blue moon.
Although it is good that Google Analytics tracks these pages, these pages
can also skew your data a lot. So to flter these pages, you need to select
the Unique Pageviews option:
109
Depending on the time frame you have selected, you can fll in any number
to flter out the least visited pages, and focus just on the high trafc
volume pages.
Just have a look through all the options you can fnd in these flters. They
can actually difer depending on which section youre presently at. In any
case, flters can defnitely make your life a lot easier and help you focus
your data on the parts of your website that actually matters.
Analyzing the bounce rate
We call it a bounce when a visitor enters your website and instantly
leaves again, without interacting with the page at all. The bounce rate tells
you how high the percentage of visitors is that immediately leave your
website after landing on it. A high bounce rate could indicate a couple of
things:
Poor usability, visitors dont know where to click or fnd the information
they need.
It could be that visitors expected something else from your website.
Your site could rank for the wrong keywords.
People respond poorly to low speed.
And bad design is a possible cause.
However, its hard to say when a bounce rate is high or low because that
depends completely on the type of website you have. A normal bounce
rate usually lies between 40 and 70 percent.
110
You can fnd information on your websites
bounce rate in the Site Content section below
Behavior. The only useful place to check your
bounce rate is at the Landing Pages. These
are the pages where your visitors have
entered your site. Using the flters weve
described above, youll be able to see which
one of your landing pages has a bounce rate
that you consider too high. Obviously dont
forget to order by bounce rate, by clicking on
the Bounce Rate column.
If you have specifc pages with a high bounce rate, you should look at
these pages. These pages are obviously not giving the visitors what they
expect. Ask yourself what the cause of this could be. Could you improve
the call-to-action, to make the page more clear? Maybe the page is rela-
tively slow, making people leave? Or maybe youre just not getting to your
point quickly enough? Think about all these things, and be sure you keep
improving your high bounce rate pages.
Analyzing the exit rate
For all the pages that arent your landing pages, you should be using the
Exit Rate, instead of the Bounce Rate. Lets explain the diference. Bounce
Rate is when someone immediately bounces back to where they came
from, like a ball bouncing of a wall. Exit Rate is when someone leaves your
site from a certain page, after having already browsed either a signifcant
period of time on your site, or having browsed multiple pages on your site.
111
The Exit Rate can be especially helpful for pages in certain consecutive
pages, called funnels. For instance, your checkout could consist of multiple
pages. The trick with getting the important pages that have a too high exit
rate is to go to All Pages and sort your pages by Page Value. This will show
all the pages with the highest page value on top. Now, youll have to set a
flter that will flter out all pages with an exit rate thats lower than 50%.
Obviously, if this is 99% of your website, you should go for a lower percent-
age. On top of this, you set another flter that will show only the pages
with a 1000 unique pageviews, or whatever is relevant for your website.
Now youll have a view of high exit rate pages with a (relatively) high value.
These are the pages that are most important, which weve dubbed the
Intensive Care Pages. Any improvements you can make on these pages,
will immediately translate into a higher revenue. Less people leaving your
valuable pages, means more people buying your products. Simple, right?
Yoast Tip
You can read more about Intensive Care Pages and how to plan their
improvement in our post on Planning and Checking your Conversion
Rate Optimization.
112
Analytics
Further reading
In this section, we have explained the very basics of Google Analytics. If
you want to know more about the possibilities of Google Analytics, you
should defnitely look into the training videos and tutorials Google
Analytics ofers. Be aware that Google Analytics is only one of many pack-
ages that exist to track your statistics. Other packages for examples are
getclicky or Mint. On yoast.com we wrote many blog posts on Analytics,
both Google Analytics as other packages.
113
Section
Conversion Research
by Marieke van de Rakt and Thijs de Valk
114
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of doing research on your
website. Aim of this research is to improve your sales. In the frst chapter
well go into A / B testing and whats involved when you want to set them
up. It takes a lot more than just whipping some tests, so read thoroughly.
The next chapter will teach you the basics of survey-research.
115
Chapter 19
A / B Tests
What is A / B testing?
A / B testing means youll test the page of a website as it is now (A), against
a variation of that page (B). The idea is that you test which version results
in the most conversions: the most sales, or the most returning visitors.
You could for instance change the color of your call-to-action-button,
to see if that leads to more clicks and sales.
A B
In your optimization process, A / B testing is one of the easiest and fastest
ways to get results. When your website is important for your business,
you should realize this: optimization is never over. Optimizing your web -
site using A / B testing really is a continuous and on-going process.
Hypothesize frst
Before making any A and B variations, its really important to think about
what youre going to do. If you want to run a test, you should frst hypothe-
size. You should be able to explain what youre changing on your website
and why. What efect do you think the change will have? And what are you
basing that expectation on?
116
One way to come up with ideas for changes in (the design of) your website
is to look for other people or websites that have (had) similar issues.
What works for other website, could well work for your site as well! You
should start by reading about Usability and Conversion on yoast.com or
on Wheel of Persuasion. Reading this book (especially the sections on
Navigation and Sales) should defnitely give you ideas about possibly
improvements! In chapter 16 we told you that adding a progress bar
could help increase your sale, because such a progress bar gamifes the
checkout process. You could run an A / B-test to check whether a progress
bar in fact increases the sales on your website as well. Your hypothesis
then is that version B (with progress bar) will get more conversions
because people will be more willing to complete the checkout because of
the gamifcation.
Doing A / B-test while formulating hypotheses, will prevent yourself from
running tests that make no sense at all. And not running tests that you
dont need in the frst place saves you time. And as they say: time is
money. Or at least you couldve been passed out on the couch rather
than running useless tests. And thats obviously a much better way to
spend your time.
Become Sherlock Holmes
Of course, if you want to hypothesize, you frst need to have some idea as
to where youre losing the most customers. But perhaps you dont have a
clue! You just feel youre not doing as well as you could. The answer to that
dilemma is simple: become Sherlock Holmes.
117
Were not talking about dressing up as
Sherlock, of course! Although Joost and
Michiel have found this can really help
bringing themselves in the right mind-
set. What we mean is you have to be
open to all options and really investigate
your website. And there are quite some
ways to investigate. Well name two here.
1Google Analytics
The most obvious frst place to look is Google Analytics. You can read
more about Google Analytics in the previous section in this book.
Google Analytics really is a treasure trove when it comes to usable data.
You can fnd out where people are entering and leaving your website. Or
fnd out what people are searching for within your site, where in your
sales process people are dropping of, etc.
2Surveys
In come the surveys! Surveys are really the easiest and least intrusive way
to get direct feedback from your visitors. And you can just ask the ques-
tions youre interested in. The results of your surveys could really pinpoint
the mysterious issues youve uncovered in Google Analytics. In the next
chapter well go into detail of how to use surveys and what you can do
with them.
118
Why test at all?
If you have read our book and investigated upon the improvements you
could make on your website, why not instantly make these changes? Why
should you test frst? Your website and your product are unique. We
always recommend A / B testing if you make improvements. Testing your
improvements makes it far less likely that other factors are infuencing
your outcome. So you simply know more surely that its really the changes
youve made giving you the better or worse results.
Tools
There are several ways of creating your test variations, but the easiest
way by far are A / B testing tools. Our personal favorite is Convert (check
convert.com/yoast for an awesome free ofer), because they simply have
the best support and could help us in ways none of their competitors
could. Convert makes sure that half of your visitors views the old page (A),
while the other half will visit the new and improved page (B).
To get started
In order to get started you thus need two versions of the page youre
improving. Subsequently, youll need a tool like convert to analyze your
results. These A / B testing tools make it possible to create variations with-
out any knowledge of coding whatsoever.
119
Yoast Tip
Use our free Convert Experiments by Yoast plugin. With a few
simple clicks youll be able to create variations and test them against
each other.
Analyzing
Convert will help you to interpret your results giving charts like these:
You can easily interpret which variation gets most conversions or most
sales. When diferences are small, you should be more careful with your
interpretation.
Setting up A / B tests
There are a few things you need to be aware of, when youre setting up
your tests:
1 When setting up A / B tests, you shouldnt be afraid to make big changes.
People are often seduced by people saying that making a minor change
gave them a huge increase in sales and revenue. But dont fool yourself:
120
this most probably wont be the case for you. So to get big improve-
ments in sales, youll need big changes.
2 Dont stare at your conversion rate of the individual products too
long. The only thing that should really matter to you is your revenue.
Sometimes a variation with a lower conversion rate actually earns you
more. People might buy more, or more expensive products from you
due to the changes youve made.
3 Check if whats being tracked by the A / B tool is actually accurate.
Unfortunately, it happens too often that your A / B tests are missing
some sales. This can as simple as a page where youre selling the same
product, which youve forgotten. However, sometimes theres actually
really something wrong. So keep an eye on your data!
4 Have patience with your tests. We usually tell people to leave tests
running for at least 7 days. This will make sure the diferences in days
are always accounted for.
121
Chapter 20
Survey research
Introduction
In this chapter, we will teach you the basics of doing a survey. Well explain
the purpose of doing a survey and give practical tips on how to set up a
survey and to (start to) analyze results.
Knowing your audience: do a survey
Google Analytics gives some information about your visitors. But besides
that, you are pretty much clueless about your audience. If you have a
webshop, youll know some things about the people who buy your stuf.
You probably know where they live, maybe you know how old they are
and whether they are men or women. However, youll only have informa-
tion about those people who decide to buy something. Youre still left
entirely in the dark about the intentions and characteristics of people
who dont buy your products. The only way to really get an idea of your
audience, their characteristics and their intentions is to ask your audi-
ence questions.
Why is it important to know your audience?
Of course youll have some idea of what your audience looks like. You
have an image of a visitor in mind when youre writing an article for your
blog, or when youre adding products to your webshop. If you have a
122
personal website with your scientifc work on it, it is to be expected that
your audience will consist of people with a personal or professional inter-
est in your feld of expertise. If your have an arts and crafts webshop, your
audience will probably be people who like to use scissors. So, why should
you do a complicated survey and annoy your visitors with questions you
already have the answers to?
Multiple audiences
It could well be that youre reaching people who are somewhat diferent
than the audience you had in mind. Or perhaps, youre reaching multiple
audiences. In our example of the arts and crafts webshop, you could be
reaching both the die-hard arts and crafters as well as people who shop
incidentally. Next to that, you could be reaching people who shop to do
arts and crafts with their children, while another group visits your website
for professional materials. These diferent groups within your audience
could very well be looking for slightly diferent products. Also, it could well
be that in order to be convinced to buy your product, these diferent
groups need a diferent approach.
Adept marketing strategies
Knowing your audience better allows you to adjust your marketing strat-
egies on your audiences, making them more efective. Also, it allows you
to consider making adjustments to your assortment on the base of your
audiences preferences. Read Mariekes Post on yoast.com for more
explanation about the advantages of knowing your audience.
123
Setting up a questionnaire
It seems so easy. You just put some questions in a survey and present
them to your audience. Theyll choose between some categories youve
made up between cofee and lunch. Creating survey questions however,
is complicated. If your questions arent well formulated you could be
measuring the wrong thing. And if your questions are of bad quality, your
results will be absolutely useless. Questions should be valid, meaning that
they have to measure what you want them to measure. And questions
should be reliable, meaning that questions should be answered in the
same way by the same people, regardless of other factors (read more
about validity and reliability in box 1.1).
Open questions or multiple choice
You should think about the type of questions you want to formulate. The
type of questions you choose depend largely on the number of people
youll reach. Open questions (in which you will allow people to type their
answers) will give much information, but the information will become
overwhelming if you have too many respondents. If you have many
respondents, multiple choice questions are much easier to analyze.
Formulating survey questions
Here are some guidelines you should bear in mind if youre formulating
questions for a survey:
1 Make sure your question isnt vague. For instance, dont ask have you
ever visited my website? but how often did you visit my website in the
last year?.
124
2 Make sure that your question is understandable, try to avoid compli-
cated terms and long sentences.
3 Make sure you ask only one thing in your question. For example, dont
ask people whether they like your products and your service. It could
well be that they like your products but they dont like your service and
that makes the question impossible to answer.
4 Make sure your question it not suggestive but neutral. Formulations
like: dont you also think, should be avoided.
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 youd have to ask whether theyve ever bought one
of your products, before asking such a question.
6 Think about the answering possibilities you give people. Make sure
you give all possible answering possibilities. 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 fll 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 infuenced people by your previous
questions.
8 Always make sure you test your questionnaire on some individuals who
could be part of your audience.
125
Box 1.1: Validity and Reliability
Validity:
The validity of a measurement tool (for example a question in a
survey) tells us the degree to which the tool actually measures what
it claims to measure. Sometimes it is referred to as accuracy.
Reliability:
Reliability is the extent to which a measurement gives consistent
results. So, if you pose the same question to the same person twice,
will the answers be the same? A reliable measurement tool results
in the same answers over and over again.
Diference between reliability and validity:
Imagine a person of 200 pounds stepping on the scale 5 times and
getting readings of 15, 250, 95, 140 and 500 pounds. This scale is
not reliable, because the reading is diferent every time. If the scale
consistently reads 150 pounds, the scale is reliable, because the
readings are the same. However, the scale is not valid, because the
weight is wrong. It does not measure what you want it to measure.
So how do you collect the data?
After you conscientiously formulated your questionnaire, you can set up
your online survey. There are numerous free (and premium) packages
that allow for an online questionnaire. For example Polldaddy but other
packages could work fne as well. You can set up a questionnaire that
126
pops up when people enter a certain page on your website. You can also
send a link to your questionnaire in your newsletter. It is really easy to
create a questionnaire in such an application.
Subsequently, people will fll out the online questionnaire and the data
are stored in the online application of your choice. Some packages allow
for uploading of the results in an Excel fle. You can subsequently do
analyses in any statistical package. If you are not such a statistics nerd,
you can leave the data in the survey package and start analyzing within
the package.
Yoast Tip
At Yoast we usually work with Polldaddy because of the beautiful
integration with WordPress.
Analyzing your data
Survey Package instantly present your results. Polldaddy presents fre-
quencies and percentages in an easy to grasp format. Polldaddy also
allows for flters, which makes it easy to analyze specifc groups. For most
website owners, those tables are all they need. You can see what people
answered to your questions.
If you want to do more sophisticated analyses, you should make sure to
upload your results in an Excel format. You can use Excel to do your
analyses, but we would recommend using SPSS or R.
127
Conversion Research
Further reading
In this section, we explained the basics about doing research on your
website. On yoast.com, we have recently started doing research ourselves.
We aim to write scientic articles as well as blog posts on yoast.com about
our experiences and results.
128
Section
Social Media
by Annelieke van den Berg
129
About this section
Most of us internet users are active on social media. If you want to reach
your audience, social media is the way to get to them. In this frst chapter
of this section well explain what social media are and why you should
use them. In the next and fnal chapter of this section, we will explain
diferences between social media channels and give tips how to use social
media to your advantage!
130
Chapter 21
Why use social media?
What is social media?
Back in 2002, Friendster and MySpace were the frst real social media
websites. The social aspect of the internet already existed of course. The
community website GeoCities could have been the basis of our current
social media. In 2003 LinkedIn started. In 2004 Mark Zuckerberg set up
Facebook. Now, ten years later, 70% of internet users are active on
social media.
Its hard to summarize all social media in one sentence. According to the
Oxford dictionary social media is websites and applications that enable
users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. But
there is so much more.
If you are a business owner, social media is a tool for marketing. If you are
a web developer, social media is a place to gather and discuss new things
and problems. If you fnd it difcult to make new friends, social media is
your dating service.
Presently there are a lot of social media channels and the list keeps getting
longer and longer. Its safe to say that the most popular social media
channels at this moment are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest
and LinkedIn. But there are many more: About.me and Habbo. And some
music loving people just cant say goodbye to MySpace either.
131
In chapter 22, we discuss the most important media channels in detail
and explain a bit more about how you should use them.
Why should you use social media?
We have already mentioned the word-of-mouth marketing social media
can do for you. Thats just one aspect. It does help to create authority like
that. Besides that, social media help a lot to grow a community around
your website. If you can get people to commit to your brand or website by
liking your Facebook page or following you on Twitter, that means you can
create a regular audience for your blog posts. If we release an article on
yoast.com, the frst thing we do after that is using social media to push
that article to the public. We have a number of followers on Twitter that
automatically share our content with their followers, which creates a
snowball efect: more and more people will know we have published that
article and the new and return trafc to our website increases.
Yoast Tip
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 on Facebook.
Social media is important for SEO
You should also use social media as part of your SEO strategy. As social
media become popular, Google and other search engines cant ignore
them any longer. Google even made its own social medium called Google+.
132
It means that your sites popularity on social media is getting more and
more important for your marketing campaign as well as for SEO. The
reason for this is simple: if people talk about you, online or ofine, you will
be important in relation to the topic at hand. Social media is the new
marketplace, where people share questions and reviews about products
and events. And youd better make sure these are your products and
events, right?
Tweets and Facebook posts dont get the highest rankings in Google, but
Facebook pages and profles for sure do. See what happens when you do
a search for Yoast:
133
As you can see, Google returns Yoasts Twitter account and Facebook
page as the third and fourth result. So make sure you have these social
profles and use them on a regular basis. Your social media account must
be public. So for instance, if you write a great post on Facebook and you
want Google to see it, you must set that post as public.
Yoast Tip
We have successfully deployed Facebook campaigns and promoted
posts on that platform. With all the information Facebook has gath-
ered from their users, they allow to target your ads right in the middle
of your target audience. If you havent tried that jet, be sure to inves-
tigate the possibilities of Facebook advertising for your company or
product. Its a very nice and afordable way to promote it.
134
Chapter 22
How to use social media?
Introduction
In this chapter, we will explain how to use social media and which social
media channel you should use for which purpose. We will give some
useful tips how you can improve your own social media strategy.
Social media strategy
Social media are easy accessible, free and quick. Pitfall is that people think
too lightly about how to use them to their advantage. We would strongly
recommend to take time to formulate a clear social media strategy. You
should ask yourself the following questions:
What do I want to accomplish with the use of social media?
What audience do I want to reach with social media?
What content do I want to share with my audience (and what not)?
How does my social media strategy ft in my larger marketing
strategy?
Which social media is most suitable for my purpose(s)?
And of course: Whats my social media budget in terms of time and
money?
Write down your answers to the questions above and youll have a frst
short draft of your social media strategy.
135
You should make sure the strategy you work out for your website fts with
the purpose and the image of your website. Be aware of the diferences
between the social media channels and use these to your advantage. You
could for instance choose to use Twitter to fnd new employees, Facebook
to promote new blog posts and Pinterest to show new products.
Social media is about more than just pushing your content. If you really
want to use social media for your marketing, you must use social media
on a regular basis. And you defnitely should interact with your followers!
Social media channels
The diferent social media channels have distinct features, making them
applicable for diferent purposes. We recommend to use at least the
three biggest channels: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If you have lots
of great pictures on your website, you should defnitely use Pinterest
too. And if you have a professional business, like accountancy or
consultancy, use LinkedIn.
Yoast Tip
Create a publicly accessible account and dont just use it to push
website content on there; actively engage with your audience!
Facebook
Facebook is great for interacting with friends and family, but the business
section of Facebook is really valuable as well. Company pages help both
website owners and brands to communicate with their (future) buyers.
136
Facebook also ofers the possibility to boost your post, so it is available
in your friends timeline much longer. You have to pay for such a boost,
but you largely increase your reach with it. It is yet another way you can
advertise in Facebook.
We mentioned engaging with your audience before; Facebook also allows
that audience to interact with each other. If you do a post on some
subject, people that read that post on Facebook can ask and answer
questions about that subject. It helps if you engage in that discussion as
well, but sometimes the audience itself creates a valuable discussion that
might even inspire you to a new post or product.
Yoast Tip
There is a bonus to work in a company where everyone uses Face-
book: You can use Facebook messenger for internal communication
as well. It is easy to create groups and Facebook has a separate
phone app for Messenger.
Twitter
Twitters main characteristic is the 140 characters it allows for sending
messages to the world of other Twitter users. Its for short interaction,
fast promoting of products. Its a great source of information as well: just
send your question on Twitter and someone will answer it for sure.Twitter
is very useful to interact one-on-one with your users.
137
Most people follow loads of others, and sent lots of tweets. Due to that,
messages on Twitter are only visible for a very short time in the timeline
of your users. Retweets (other people repeating your tweet) help to keep
the focus on that tweet.
It is wise to write about a limited number of topics on Twitter. People
cannot see all your messages and if you tweet about numerous topics,
chances are larger that people dont fnd your tweets interesting and
unfollow you. Limiting the subjects also strengthens your authority on
these subjects. Do make sure that your tweets keep a personal touch.
people should have the idea that a real person is tweeting and not some
company-tweet-bot.
Google+
Google has its own social network as well: Google+. Up until now, most
people arent very active on Google+ (this could of course be diferent in
your specifc niche). We do recommend to create a Google+-account
anyway. The reasons for creating a Google+ account arent reasons having
to do with social media at all. There are other benefts that come with a
Google+-account. In our WordPress SEO plugin you can add Google+
author and publisher highlighting for your website.
Using our plugin that way could lead to Google deciding to display your
name in the search results. In fact in the past theyd even show your
photo in the search results but theyve stopped doing that in June 2014.
Google combines your posts from all the sites you write for (and how
people interact with them) to determine your authorrank around a topic.
A well-known author could have a positive infuence on the authority
138
of the post. While this isnt very infuential yet, it might become more
infuential in the future.
Google uses this feature as well to determine whos the owner of certain
content. This is called authorship. If you are an online publisher, you can
use Google+ publisher to tell Google that all the content on your website
is yours. You should simply add rel=publisher for your Google+ Page
(business) to your homepage. That code is generated by our plugin, or
you can read more about how to do that here.
Pinterest
For some websites and companies, Pinterest could prove to be very valu-
able. If youre selling products and have nice pictures of these products,
you should defnitely use pinterest to promote these. If you are for exam-
ple an interior designer or a photographer, Pinterest is your online
portfolio. If you create idea boards, people will start to follow these
boards. This could be a great way to market new products.
Another example: if someones son is really into buses, and they want to
create a bedroom for him with that theme, Pinterest is where they might
get new ideas for that. If you have a business that sells wall decals, you
want that customer to fnd you and your bus wall decals. Adding pictures
of your products to Pinterest could lead new customers to your products.
LinkedIn
Of all the social platforms we mentioned, we think LinkedIn is the most
boring one, as it is really targeted to professionals. That doesnt mean its
not valuable! Companies should defnitely make a LinkedIn company
139
page, to make sure potential employees can fnd them. LinkedIn could
be useful to post job-openings and to (keep in) contact with other
companies.
LinkedIn is also very valuable to share fndings and get responses to new
products if you actively engage in Groups. You can easily set these up
yourself or join an open group. For specifc topics, LinkedIn also allows for
closed groups where new members have to apply. If you have a group of
your own, you can send group announcements and email all members,
which might come in handy in case of product releases or surveys.
Social and sharing buttons for your website
Social buttons
When referring to social buttons, unlike social share buttons, we mean
the buttons or icons on your website that link to your profles on social
platforms. If people follow these links, they can for instance like your
company or website on Facebook, or follow it on Twitter.
The most important thing about social buttons is that you dont hide them
in the footer; they need to catch your visitors eye. Use buttons that are not
too small and not too fancy, and above all are easy to recognize as social
buttons. They should have a prominent place on your homepage and
other pages, for instance at the top of your page or as the very frst item in
a sidebar. Social buttons that seem to work best are buttons like this:
140
Yoast Tip
Use social sharing buttons that mimic the style of the sites theyre
aimed at. People should recognize the social medium instantly.
Sharing buttons
Sharing buttons are used to share and / or like, recommend or retweet a
specifc page or post on your website. We advise to place your sharing
buttons near the content, preferably underneath your post. The reason
for that is that if you want a quality tweet, people should at least have
read the post. Makes sense, doesnt it?
As with social buttons, use sharing buttons people will recognize as such.
And keep in mind that they should not look exactly the same as your
social buttons. Most social platforms ofer a variety of buttons, we have
chosen to use these on our website:
In conclusion
Social media is becoming more and more important, because everybody
uses it. We dont know how search engines will treat social media links,
likes and shares in the future. We do know that social media is increasingly
important for SEO. Thats why we advise you to really think about your own
social media strategy and defnitely use social media on your website.
141
Social Media
Further reading
This section covered the very basics of the importance of social media for
your website. You should keep up with all the trends in social media in
order to keep up to date. If you want to read more about our view on
social media, you can read our blog posts about Social Media.
142
Section
Speed
by Joost de Valk
143
About this section
Site speed is important for user experience as well as for SEO. It is def-
nitely something you should be focussing on when improving your
website. In this frst chapter we will focus on the importance of site speed
and we will introduce numerous tools to check your site speed. We will
give practical tips to improve the speed of your own website. We would
like to warn you and apologize: site speed is a technical subject. This
section could be a bit (too) technical from time to time. We try to give lots
of further reading options to create many options for you to eventually
grasp the general idea.
144
Chapter 23
Checking your site speed
Why is site speed important?
UX and conversion
Having a slow website will have a serious negative impact on your user
experience. People get more frustrated with a website which takes ages
to load. Satisfaction with a website and site speed thus go hand in hand.
In order to keep your customers happy and satisfed, you need to keep
your website speed high. Of course, satisfed visitors are much more likely
to become buyers in your webshop, than dissatisfed customers. Website
speed is thus very important for your conversion as well.
SEO
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 import-
ant one, its growing in importance more and more. This means that
having a faster website will increase your ranking position in Google. A
slow website, will result in a slow crawling rate that Google uses to index
your site. Making your website faster, will be a relatively easy way to
increase the ranking position in Google.
145
Which tools can you use to test your site speed?
In our website reviews, we always check the site speed of a website.
Obviously, site speed is diferent when checking it from diferent loca-
tions. 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
Google Page Speed Insights splits mobile and desktop, Pingdom Tools
allows for multiple locations and Yslow has segmented the checks nicely.
WebPageTest has a few main checks it grades nicely. We would recom-
mend to use all of these tools to check your site speed. Combined they
give the most complete overview of the site speed of your site.
If you want to test your site speed, you can fll out 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 upon your site speed. Both Google and YSlow have
reasonably good, though slightly techy, explanations on the various
aspects that you can improve.The other tools show somewhat less expla-
nation and are a bit harder to interpret.
146
Chapter 24
Increasing your site speed
Introduction
In this chapter we will frst introduce the most important problems which
cause low site speed. We will explain these problems, discuss possible
solutions and provide some practical tips.
Three Common problems
You can basically divide the problems with site speed into three groups:
too many fles / requests;
fle size (fles that are too large);
slow responses by the web server.
We will discuss these problems in depth, while ofering practical solutions.
Number of fles / requests
Problem: too many fles
Each page on your website is built in code. This code can be quite
complicated. A page usually consists of an HTML fle, one or more CSS
stylesheets, some JavaScript and images. The amount of javascript,
stylesheet and images and the way you present your code to the end
user determines how fast your site loads. Your site could thus be slow
because of the number of fles your website is built in.
147
Especially when people are visiting multiple pages of your website, you
would like them to click relatively quick through your pages. You would
want the second and further page loads to be quite a bit faster than
the frst one. Reducing the number of fles on your page can be done in
diferent ways.
Solution 1: reduce number of fles
The frst way is to tell the users browser this fle will stay the same for the
next year and the browser will save (cache) it locally and only has to load
it once. We call this setting a far future expire time .
Solution 2: combine fles
The second thing to do is combine fles. JavaScript fles can usually just
be concatenated and CSS fles can be combined. Doing this means
that where you once had 4 JavaScript fles, you might now have one.
Combining pages can improve your sites speed tremendously.
Yoast Tip
Both the far future expire time as well as combining of fles can be
done by plugins, for instance by W3 Total Cache. Another solution is
to deal with it within your theme, by your developer.
148
File size
Problem 1: fle size
You know by now that your website is built in all kinds of complicated
code. These HTML, CSS and JS fles often contain a lot of inline comments
and whitespace. This makes it more easily readable for your developer,
but theres no reason why you should serve all of that to every visitor of
your site. To a browser it doesnt make one bit of diference whether
there are a few carriage returns more or less in a document, itll just parse
the HTML, JS, CSS the same way as it always does. Larger HTML, JS and
CSS fles makes the site speed go down.
Solution: minify
This is why you should minify those fles. This, again, can be dealt with by
plugins, but its best if your theme has done it already. Youll still want to
minify the JS and CSS fles added by plugins though.
Problem 2: image size
Images can have a lot of metadata stored in them that makes them a lot
slower. They can also have color information for colors that arent used
inside the image. All of this makes for image fles that are sometimes up
to 30-40% larger than they need to be, causing your page to be slower
than needed.
Solution: minify
Tools like Smush.it and PunyPng (and there are tons of desktop versions
of programs like this too, like ImageOptim for the Mac) can help you minify
your images.
149
Yoast Tip
Make sure that your image sizes arent too large! A common issue is
people embedding an image that is displayed as 100 x 100 pixels at
for instance a 500 x 500 pixels size.
Web server responses
Problem: slow web server
Another reason for low site speed could be found in a slow response of
the web server. If your web server is overloaded with requests, it can
sometimes take time for the web server to get to your request. It could
also be that the server is on the other end of the world and theres
therefor some natural lag between your request and the servers
response.
Solution 1: CDN
The only thing you really need to be served by your webserver is the
HTML, the content of your site. The images dont change and can be
served from a server that is geographically closer to your visitor. A Content
Delivery System (CDN) does exactly that, it retrieves static fles from your
server and then serves them from a server they have thats closer to your
visitor. These servers are also optimized for the delivery of static fles and
because of that much faster at it.
150
Yoast Tip
We love and use MaxCDN for that at Yoast and have written more
about that here.
Solution 2: get better hosting
Site speed has a lot to do with the your hosting. Many of the things above
are things that your hosting party could take care of for you. Hosts
like Synthesis and WP Engine will do this and more and more hosts are
starting to do this.
Its important to realize though that its absolutely worth it to invest in
good hosting. $5 a month for hosting is, if youre serious about your
website, just not enough. If you can aford it, go for managed WordPress
hosting and youll get a lot more help in improving your site.
Caching plugins
There are two major caching plugins for WordPress, W3 Total Cache and
WP Super Cache. While W3 Total Cache is technically superior and can do
almost all of the things weve mentioned that you should be doing, weve
also found it to be dangerous. Its as though youre giving a kid a butchers
knife and tell it to cut its meat. Things might go wrong. You have too many
options and if you do not know what options to choose, you could really
slow down your site. Weve had several occasions where a site we were
reviewing was dog slow, and by unchecking just two boxes in W3 Total
Cache, we made it much, much, much faster.
151
One of the benefts of using W3 Total Cache is that the plugin allows for
expire times per fletype. Its obvious that a CSS fle will change a lot
less often than an HTML fle. If you add another post to your website,
the HTML of every page that lists that post changes. Most plugins, like
WP Super Cache, Quick Cache or Hyper Cache, to name a few, set one
expire time for all fletypes.
WP Super Cache does what it says on the tin: it caches your site. It does
that well, without too many bells and whistles and therefore is often a
better solution if youre not technical.
Yoast Tip
Use W3 Total Cache if you are an advanced experience user, and
choose WP Super Cache if you are only a beginner in the art of speed
optimization.
152
Site Speed
Further reading
In this section we have covered the very basics on site speed. Site speed
is a relatively technical topic. Understanding this material requires some
development skills (or budget to hire a developer). If you arent scared
of by technical stuf, you should defnitely look into our posts about
Development. Also, we wrote great posts about how to get Google to
crawl your site faster, how to clean and speed up your WordPress site
and about WordPress hosting parties.