Optimize yourWordPress 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

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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

Introductionby Marieke van de Rakt

6

Chapter 1

About this book

Introduction

Building a WordPress website isn’t that hard. WordPress was developed

in order to make blogging easy and accessible for a very large audience.

You can figure 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 find your

website? What do you have to do to make people buy your stuff?

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

find your website on Google and other search engines. You should make

sure users of your website can find the information you want them to

find. And if you have a shop, you should make sure that people can find

and (want to) buy your products.

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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. We’ll 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 field 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.

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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 first 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

flexibility. 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.

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Why use WordPress?

Let’s 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 find testimonials on WordPress.org.

It’s very easy!

Making content in WordPress is very easy. It’s just as easy as making a

document in Microsoft Word. You don’t 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.

It’s very flexible!

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 different theme and give your website an entirely different 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 offer 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.

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Yoast Tip

At Yoast, we offer several themes and numerous free and premium

plugins to optimize your website.

It’s very free!

You do not have to pay any kind of license fee to WordPress. It’s free! And

it’s open source. So you are free to use WordPress in any way you choose:

you can install it, use it, change it, distribute it. As the most popular CMS

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.

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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 offer and will continue to offer free plugins.

In order for Yoast to continue to develop our products and to give

support, we have to sell stuff. We sell consultancy and we sell (support

and updates to our) plugins and themes.

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For the free plugins, there are volunteers on the WordPress forums, but

we don’t 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 beneficial 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.

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Section

Search Engine Optimizationby 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.

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Chapter 3

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

What does Google do?

How does Google find 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 finds a new or revised version. Depending on the traffic

on your site and the amount of changes you make on your website,

Google comes around more or less often. For Google to know of the exis-

tence of your website, there first has to be a link from another site to your

site. Following that link will lead to the first crawler-session and the first

save in the index.

Google’s secret algorithm

After indexing your website, Google can show your website in the search

results.

Google has a specific 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

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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.

Google’s results page

Google’s result page shows 7 or 10 links to sites which fit 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 specific 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

It’s 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.

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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 fit ones website to Google’s

algorithm. Although Google’s 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 Google’s 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 off-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

off-page factors are much harder to influence. In chapter 8, we discuss

link building as one technique to influence your ranking via off-page

factors.

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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 don’t work

in the long run, and might even backfire. Google’s mission is to build the

perfect search engine that helps people find what they are looking for.

Making your website and your marketing strategy fit 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 fixes 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

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free plugin, we also offer 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.

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Chapter 4

Keyword research

Introduction

The first 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 fit your site. You want to be found by your (potential)

customers. Ranking on terms that don’t fit 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 fit 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.

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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

specifically. Ranking in these markets is hard. Find out what differentiates

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

specifically 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

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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 you’re

actually spending money to advertise on. Use the tool to find 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 finds the keyword expansions Google gives and then

requests more of them. So if you type ‘example‘, it’ll also give you the

expansions for ‘example a…’ till ‘example z…’ etc. It’s a great way to

quickly find more niche keywords you can focus on. A similar tool is

Übersuggest.

• Google Trends

While you can’t reliably get traffic information for keywords, Google

Trends does allow you to relatively compare the traffic 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 difference for numerous geographical regions.

It’s very important to check Google Trends if you expect that some of

your keywords are seasonal, for instance due to regulations, holiday

seasons etc.

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• Your internal search engine

What are people looking for on your site? A category we always find

particularly interesting is the set of keywords that didn’t get any results:

this was stuff people were expecting but didn’t find, it’s very possible

for you to give those products a different 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 don’t just pick terms that consist of one word only. The

longer (and more specific) 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 specific and less common, and will probably

be used by potential visitors that already know what they want to find 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 find

the best coffee in Seattle?”

One of the main benefits of using long-tail keywords is that, although

these keywords may be used less in search, the visitor that finds your

website using them is more likely to buy your stuff. He or she has already

thought things over, has possibly compared products or types and there-

fore does a more specific search.

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Yoast Tip

When you do a search in Google, be sure to scroll to the bottom of

the first search result page to find 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 first column and add columns in

which you put the different levels of your site’s structure. In chapter 5 you

can read more about site structure.

Searchterms

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 specific 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.

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Example keyword research

The theory of keyword research can be a bit dry. We will spice things up!

We’ll give you an example of step 1 to 3. Let’s say that I have a blog about

children. I write about children’s clothes, children’s room and children’s

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

children’s clothes children’s clothes trends

children’s room               children’s room accessories

children’s room furniture    children’s room accessories trends

children’s decorations     children’s decorations trends

children’s toys      children’s toys trends

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Step 3: pages

Searchterms

level 1:homepage.com

level 2:/ subpages

level 3: / sub /subpages

level 4: sub / sub /subpages

Children’sclothes

homepage.com / clothing

Children’sclothes trends

/ clothing / trends

Children’sroom

homepage.com / room

Children’sroom accessoires

/ room / accessoires

Children’s room accessoires trends

/ room /acces-soires /trends

Figure 2: pages

Now, of course… Did we make the right choice?

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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, children’s clothes etc anyway, or go for kids clothes. There

are no rights or wrongs in this regard, you just have to be aware that

you’re making this decision.

Cornerstone articles

Important content

Really important content deserves a page within your site’s 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 that’s 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 you’re 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.

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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 stuff: lead them to your shop. Do you want them to

subscribe to your newsletter: offer them a form to sign up.

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Chapter 5

Site Structure

Introduction

The way your site is structured will give Google important clues about

where to find the most important content. A good site structure could

thus lead to a higher ranking in Google. Your site’s structure determines

whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how

easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s 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 you’ve written that

has attracted links from others. Your site’s 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 you’ve 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 site’s structure in something like Visio (or even putting it in

Excel). In chapter 3 we help you to create such a structure. What you’ll

want to do is put all the pages and sections of your website in a structure

30

as a tree. After drawing your site’s 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 figure 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.

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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 reflection of the content on

your website.

Looking at figure 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 reflect content

In making your site structure, make sure that the structure reflects the

content. Similar things should be grouped together, while things that are

in fact different should be put in another section.

The structure of the old yoast.com was unbalanced did not reflect

the content. There were three pages that were basically about

Joost de Valk: About, Projects and Websites. These three pages

were not very different in content, but were treated differently 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

Traffic

Pages that generate a lot of traffic 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 traffic and need a high place on your pyramid.

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In our example, we found out that the WordPress pages were

responsible for about 30% of the site traffic, 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 figure 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 refined section structure.

As you can see we decided to move some pages up the tree, and

also removed some pages. When you’re rethinking your site

structure you’ll often find that some pages are not really beneficial

to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if that’s

the case.

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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, that’s

not what we were hoping people came to our site for.

Naming your sections

Once you’re satisfied 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 it’s own section, you can bet

people are searching for it as well. That’s why it’s 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 you’re 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 you’re like us and you’ve 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 figure 5.

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WordPress Plugins

SEOTools

CodeSnippets

AboutJoost de Valk Contact

SEO Blog

Figure 5: sensible section names1

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 you’re 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 you’re linking from pages that are closely related to each other

content-wise, you’re increasing your site’s possibility to rank. Doing it like

this, will help the search engine out by showing it what’s related and

what isn’t.

1 we already updated our site structure again (and again), but this remains the most vivid example.

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Take figure 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 it’s only related to

plugin 4.

From your new site structure to URLs

Once you’ve created your new site structure, you can go forth and create

the URLs for this structure. Each page’s 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.

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Keep in mind the following things while implementing your new URLs

If you’re 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 – don’t 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. There’s no

valid reason anymore to have a different page for printing purposes

because all major browsers support print stylesheets.

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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 find 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 finding 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 findability. 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 it’s

not green, you’ve got stuff to fix!

Having a site which Google does not crawl (sufficiently) could have several

causes. You could be:

1 blocking the specific 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.

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1  Robots.txt

Every website should have the file robots.txt. If you do not created such

a file yourself, WordPress will generate one for you. Robots.txt is a very

powerful file, which indicates which sections of your site are blocked from

robots including Google. It’s 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 textarea’s. The first 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 don’t know how to use Google

Webmaster Tools, start reading here.

2  Noindex 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.

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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 Google’s

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 don’t specify any meta robots tags (most pages on the web

don’t), the default is for that page to allow both indexation and following,

so the default is “index,follow”.

3  Wrong canonical

If you have two pages holding the same content, that’s problematic for

your rankings. To fix 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 beneficial to use a canonical link from

the duplicate page to the main page (you can do this with WordPress

SEO). If you don’t know which one is the ‘canonical’ one: pick one. Not

doing anything is more hurtful than just picking one.

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The problem comes when you’re 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 different from the original page, Google will get

confused and your ranking may reduce as well. So make sure you use the

correct canonical links. It’s a powerful tool, use it wisely.

Findability

Now that we’ve made sure Google can index your site, it’s 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 site’s structure determines whether a search

engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find 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 URL’s of your website and keeps track

of it’s 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 find on sitemaps.org if you want

to see it. The good news is, if you’re 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.

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Whenever you publish a new or update an existing post or page, the

XML sitemap is then automatically updated and the search engines are

notified 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 you’ve 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 benefit 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 find links to

the content on your site is by adding related links to posts and pages.

Most web hosts don’t really like the related links plugins available for Word-

Press because they’re rather resource intensive for the server to run.

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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 final stage in SEO is optimization. Now we’re sure that

search engines can find our content, it’s 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 you’ve 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.

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Chapter 7

SEO copywriting

Introduction

The text on your website is a very important factor in Google’s 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.

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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 don’t use

these search terms too often. If you want to rank for a certain term - say

children’s clothes - and you write a text which has the words children’s

clothes in every sentence, chances are big that your audience will be

pretty annoyed. Your text just isn’t 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 isn’t 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 find 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 Michiel’s posts.

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Yoast Tip

Make sure you add pictures or illustrations to your text which fit 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 you’re

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 find 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.

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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

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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).

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Chapter 8

Link building

Introduction

Competitiveness of niche

In chapter 3 we divided the factors influencing Google’s algorithm in two

categories. First, we distinguished on-page factors, which included, among

others, content and internal linking structure. And second, we distin-

guished off-page factors. Off-page factors are very hard to influence. The

niche of your business is an off-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 off-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.

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• 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 specifically the receiving page.

• People click on links, resulting in so called direct traffic.

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic

of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the

receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an

entirely different topic. On top of that, a link from 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 Joost’s 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 shouldn’t do any link building at all? Of course not!

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Link building the right way

Don’ts

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.

It’s very important to keep in mind that if a link will never get natural clicks,

from people reading an article and clicking through, it’s 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 fit 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!

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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

shouldn’t be a blog post ‘just to be linked on that website’. If your posts

actually fits the guest blog and contributes to the website than it’s perfectly

OK. If you’re going to do it at scale and reproduce the same content all

the time: that won’t work.

Yoast Tip

Paddy Moogan has written an e-book about link building that we find

is one of the most comprehensive on the topic. Get it here.

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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 definitive 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

Navigationby Michiel Heijmans

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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 find 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 find 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 we’ll stop at every navigational elements

we encounter and share our thoughts on this option. Sometimes we will

include insight from SEO, or effects on user experience, for using that

option. Finally, we have also included a few remarks on navigation on your

mobile website.

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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. That’s 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 find 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.

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Figure 7: imaginary map of your web page.

Travelling your website

In Jonathan Swift’s well-known novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), we find a

man that is lost at sea after shipwrecking. That totally resembles Daniel

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), with one major difference: Robinson

had nowhere to go but the Island of Despair, while Gulliver travels on to

end up on four different locations before finally 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

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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 we’re sure you’ll 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.

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Chapter 10

Top menu navigation: coming in from the North

Now let’s 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 can’t find what we are looking

for, a simple click will bring us back to a

page we already know. It’s 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.

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Yoast Tip

Make sure your visitors can’t 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 find yourself left with a

number of menu items that do not fit the main menu (more on that later)

in any way. Let’s mention a few to make this more clear:

Support

Documentation

How-to Register

RSSFeedbackContact

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.

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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 you’ve 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 find 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,

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is also called your global navigation. It’s not always a horizontal naviga-

tion and it’s 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 it’s 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 reflect the structure of your website. Do not flood 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.

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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!

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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 find 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 offer 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 specific page, what

would be more easy than offer 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.

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Breadcrumbs

You’ll 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 haven’t 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.

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Yoast Tip

Breadcrumbs improve the navigation of your site, but are valuable

for SEO as well.

On-page navigation

At Yoast, we don’t 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. That’s 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 benefit 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 first things that come to mind when listing

navigational options. We’re not even sure that is the right terminology for

these blocks, but calling them teasers seems to cover their purpose.

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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 you’re 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.

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By adding a numbered pagination, linking for instance the first, second,

third, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, up to the ninetieth and last page, you

would reduce that number of clicks to five. 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 don’t 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 offers 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 difference 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

don’t convey much meaning. But if you added another taxonomy called

Region, it’d 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

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could make it free form (tags). Both have their benefits, but choose wisely,

as changing from one to the other is a painful process.

At Yoast, we prefer using categories for high level topic specification and

tags for more specific topic specification. 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 they’re

looking for a specific topic. And that was our goal, wasn’t 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.

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Yoast Tip

Don’t go creating a list of categories longer than Rapunzel’s 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.

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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 find that one page they’re 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, you’ll really have to push to

get 50 links on that page.

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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

doesn’t 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 filled 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 you’ve 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.

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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 find 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.

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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,

let’s 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 first things we decided these themes

should have. It’s just very convenient to have that menu present at all

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times. Repeating the menu in the footer seems a bit silly, to be honest.

Why sacrifice 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 isn’t useful.

Common links that we find 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 final 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

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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 visitor’s last resort. When even

search fails, the HTML sitemap could be used to find 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.

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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. We’re 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 sufficient

white space around that link.

Mobile menu

We all know that hamburger icon, adding that as a substitute for your

menu seems logical: it’s a space saver. Most menu’s 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.

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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

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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 shouldn’t 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

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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.

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Section

Salesby Thijs de Valk

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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 we’ll 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 first chapter, we will give practical tips you

can use to easily improve the sales of your website. In the next and final

chapter of this section we will specifically look at the checkout process.

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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 definitely 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 stuff 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, you’re selling digital products, we would

recommend Easy Digital Downloads. This plugin might not look as pretty,

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but it offers a boatload of addons that make sure you can alter every-

thing you want. We’re actually using Easy Digital Downloads ourselves at

yoast.com.

The goal of your webshop

Before you can start selling anything on your website, you’ll have to have

a very clear picture of what it is you want to do with your website. 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 offering 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, we’ve made a list of

questions you should be able to answer after you’ve thought it all through:

What is your core business?

• What can people do with the products / services you’re 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?

• What’s the reason you’re offering these products / services, besides

making money?

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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 don’t 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 financial bandwagon, saying they want to

make lots of money. We urge you to think beyond that and really think

about what you’re offering and why. Because if you don’t believe in your

own products or services, there’s no chance your potential customers will.

Funneling your visitors: conversion rate optimization

In the previous sections you’ve learnt how you can get as much traffic as

possible to your website (section SEO) and how to make your website

easily navigable for these visitors (section Navigation). In this chapter

we’ll show you how to direct your visitors to the places you want them

to go. That’s what’s we call funneling: guiding your visitors towards a

desired end point. You are aiming to convert your visitors to a sale. In

the field 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

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known as conversion rate optimization. In this chapter we will give you

some tips how to optimize your conversion. At Yoast, we also offer

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

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You’ll have to make sure that these calls-to-action actually stand out in the

design of your website. The buttons have to be eye catching. A button that

doesn’t stand out is at risk of visitors completely missing it. And if people

miss it, it obviously won’t call anyone to action. Make your call-to-action

stand out by giving it a bright color you haven’t used in your website yet.

Figure 16: two examples of a call-to-action button

Product pages

Visitors should become more and more informed about your product

when they’re moving towards your product page. If you’re selling physical

products, you should try to make it as much as the ‘real thing’ as you can.

What are the odds you’d buy a product in a 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.

Offer high resolution images, from all angles, which people can zoom

in on. Possibly even videos or 3D images that people can turn around

themselves, mimicking the experience of viewing and turning a product in

a store.

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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 different than other types of

marketing. In trying to convince people to buy your stuff, you can use the

insights from social psychology and marketing. What influences 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 it’s 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.

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Testimonials

Have people leave testimonials or reviews on your website and your prod-

ucts. This will work even if your visitors don’t 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 defi-

nitely convince people to click on your call-to-action.

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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 website’s

cash register. Although a lot of your visitors might go here, that doesn’t

mean they’ll actually buy your products. Make sure you’re being clear

enough and offer them enough feedback and validation so they know

they’re heading the right way. Make them want to complete the order.

Shopping cart abandonment

In the checkout process you’ll usually still lose a lot of people. These

people do not finish 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.

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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 gamifies 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 filled 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 they’ve done the right thing. In your checkout process you could

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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

refill everything. Also, it makes people feel good to get validated. It’s a bit

difficult if you cannot write code, but it is definitely worth it if you have the

technical skills. In you want to read more about inline validation, please

read Joost’s post on checkout field validation tips and tricks.

Increase cache expiration time

Don’t 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 it’ll 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 you’re 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.

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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.

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Section

Analyticsby Annelieke van den Berg

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About this section

Oh man, do we love data! We are not just WordPress geeks, we are data

geeks as well. That’s 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 we’d like to show you

what Google Analytics is, and explain how Google Analytics can help you

improve your website.

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Chapter 17

What is Google Analytics?

In this chapter we’ll explain how Google Analytics works. In the next

chapter in this section (chapter 18) we’ll 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 file.

• How your visitors go through your sales process.

• and much more...

How to use Google Analytics

If you want to track your website’s statistics, you should start by creating

a Google Analytics account. In order to start tracking your visitors, you

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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, we’re 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 we’ll 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.

You’ll find a lot of useful statistics just by clicking through Google Analytics

and trying some things. You should make sure that you’re in the Reporting

tab.

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Reporting

Figure 18: dashboard Google Analytics Reporting

What kind of statistics does Google Analytics offer?

Real-Time

After opening Google Analytics, you can choose

to view a number of different 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 they’re looking at. But keep in

mind that this is all it is: data on what your visitors are doing right now.

This isn’t really useful for anything besides fun, and maybe checking if the

post you just published is getting some immediate visitors.

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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 they’re interested

in. However, there’s obviously no way Google

Analytics can be sure about who’s behind a pc,

tablet or smartphone, so don’t 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 first time or how many times

they’ve 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 traffic from

smartphones, you’d better have a decent responsive website!

There are two menu items we didn’t mention yet: Custom and Users Flow.

The Custom tab is there for any custom dimensions or variables you

might’ve made. This is definitely for more advanced users, so we’re 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.

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Yoast Tip

Look at pie charts for a quick and understandable overview.

Acquisition

The Acquisition tab is the tab where you can find

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 different so called Channels:

1 Direct

2 Organic Search

3 Referral

4 Social

5 Display

6 Email

7 (Other)

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The Direct is exactly that: visitors that type your URL directly into their

browser. Organic Search is all the traffic coming from search engines.

Referrals are all websites referring to your site that aren’t social media.

Social is for all the traffic coming from social media. Display is for all the

traffic coming from ads you have on other sites. Email is obviously for

traffic coming from email campaigns. And (Other) is for campaigns you’ve

created yourself.

By organizing it in these channels, you can actually quickly see where

most of your traffic 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, you’ll 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 can’t see what people searched for to end up on

that specific page.

All the other menu items below the Acquisition section are primarily for

advanced users, so we won’t go into them here. But do click through them

a bit just to see what else you can find!

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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 website’s 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. You’ll notice

a Behavior Flow that’s 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 you’ll find below it.

Below the Landing Pages, you’ll find 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 offering those

things. If you find things that people are searching for, but you don’t have

any real content on yet, be sure to add it!

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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 they’re

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

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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 won’t go into this section further, because it’s 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

definitely a section you should be filling with data, because that’s

invaluable!

Yoast Tip

If you want to know more about the specifics of a certain report

in Google Analytics, you can watch the instruction videos Google

Analytics offers. We’ve found them to be really helpful.

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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 find 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 first 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

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when you’re 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 you’ll 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 filter options

One of the more useful features of Google Analytics, is the filter feature.

With this, you can filter out any ‘noise’ you don’t want to see, so you’ll end

up with exactly those parts of your traffic you want to be seeing at that

point. On just about any page in Google Analytics, you’ll see this after

you’ve clicked the advanced text link:

advanced

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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 traffic for the / hire-us /

pages, we can simply include any page containing / hire-us / in the URL. This

will automatically exclude any page that doesn’t contain / hire-us /. If you

want just one page, such as a subpage of the / hire-us / part, you’ll need to

be more specific, for instance: / hire-us / website-review /.

Obviously, if you want to see all the traffic except that of one page or

section of your site, you simply select Exclude instead of Include in the first

dropdown (see image).

The reason this filter option is so useful, is because Google Analytics

tracks everything that’s happening on your site, usually. This means it’s

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 filter these pages, you need to select

the Unique Pageviews option:

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Depending on the time frame you have selected, you can fill in any number

to filter out the least visited pages, and focus just on the high traffic

volume pages.

Just have a look through all the options you can find in these filters. They

can actually differ depending on which section you’re presently at. In any

case, filters can definitely 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 don’t know where to click or find 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, it’s 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.

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You can find information on your website’s

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 filters we’ve

described above, you’ll be able to see which

one of your landing pages has a bounce rate

that you consider too high. Obviously don’t

forget to order by bounce rate, by clicking on

the Bounce Rate column.

If you have specific 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 you’re 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 aren’t your landing pages, you should be using the

Exit Rate, instead of the Bounce Rate. Lets explain the difference. Bounce

Rate is when someone immediately bounces back to where they came

from, like a ball bouncing off a wall. Exit Rate is when someone leaves your

site from a certain page, after having already browsed either a significant

period of time on your site, or having browsed multiple pages on your site.

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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, you’ll have to set a

filter that will filter out all pages with an exit rate that’s 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 filter that will show only the pages

with a 1000 unique pageviews, or whatever is relevant for your website.

Now you’ll have a view of high exit rate pages with a (relatively) high value.

These are the pages that are most important, which we’ve 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.

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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 definitely look into the training videos and tutorials Google

Analytics offers. 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.

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Section

Conversion Researchby Marieke van de Rakt and Thijs de Valk

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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 first chapter

we’ll go into A / B testing and what’s 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.

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Chapter 19

A / B Tests

What is A / B testing?

A / B testing means you’ll 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 first

Before making any A and B variations, it’s really important to think about

what you’re going to do. If you want to run a test, you should first hypothe-

size. You should be able to explain what you’re changing on your website

and why. What effect do you think the change will have? And what are you

basing that expectation on?

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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 definitely give you idea’s about possibly

improvements! In chapter 16 we told you that adding a progress bar

could help increase your sale, because such a progress bar gamifies 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 gamification.

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

don’t need in the first place saves you time. And as they say: time is

money. Or at least you could’ve been passed out on the couch rather

than running useless tests. And that’s obviously a much better way to

spend your time.

Become Sherlock Holmes

Of course, if you want to hypothesize, you first need to have some idea as

to where you’re losing the most customers. But perhaps you don’t have a

clue! You just feel you’re not doing as well as you could. The answer to that

dilemma is simple: become Sherlock Holmes.

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We’re 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. We’ll name two here.

1  Google Analytics

The most obvious first 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 find out where people are entering and leaving your website. Or

find out what people are searching for within your site, where in your

sales process people are dropping off, etc.

2  Surveys

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 you’re interested in. The results of your surveys could really pinpoint

the mysterious issues you’ve uncovered in Google Analytics. In the next

chapter we’ll go into detail of how to use surveys and what you can do

with them.

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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 first? 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 influencing

your outcome. So you simply know more surely that it’s really the changes

you’ve 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 offer), 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 you’re

improving. Subsequently, you’ll 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.

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Yoast Tip

Use our free Convert Experiments by Yoast plugin. With a few

simple clicks you’ll 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 differences 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 you’re setting up

your tests:

1 When setting up A / B tests, you shouldn’t 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 don’t fool yourself:

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this most probably won’t be the case for you. So to get big improve-

ments in sales, you’ll need big changes.

2 Don’t 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 you’ve made.

3 Check if what’s 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 you’re selling the same

product, which you’ve forgotten. However, sometimes there’s 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 differences in days

are always accounted for.

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Chapter 20

Survey research

Introduction

In this chapter, we will teach you the basics of doing a survey. We’ll 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, you’ll know some things about the people who buy your stuff.

You probably know where they live, maybe you know how old they are

and whether they are men or women. However, you’ll only have informa-

tion about those people who decide to buy something. You’re still left

entirely in the dark about the intentions and characteristics of people

who don’t 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 you’ll have some idea of what your audience looks like. You

have an image of a visitor in mind when you’re writing an article for your

blog, or when you’re adding products to your webshop. If you have a

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personal website with your scientific work on it, it is to be expected that

your audience will consist of people with a personal or professional inter-

est in your field 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 you’re reaching people who are somewhat different

than the audience you had in mind. Or perhaps, you’re 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 different groups within your audience

could very well be looking for slightly different products. Also, it could well

be that in order to be convinced to buy your product, these different

groups need a different approach.

Adept marketing strategies

Knowing your audience better allows you to adjust your marketing strat-

egies on your audiences, making them more effective. Also, it allows you

to consider making adjustments to your assortment on the base of your

audience’s preferences. Read Mariekes Post on yoast.com for more

explanation about the advantages of knowing your audience.

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Setting up a questionnaire

It seems so easy. You just put some questions in a survey and present

them to your audience. They’ll choose between some categories you’ve

made up between coffee and lunch. Creating survey questions however,

is complicated. If your questions aren’t 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

you’ll 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 you’re formulating

questions for a survey:

1 Make sure your question isn’t vague. For instance, don’t ask ‘have you

ever visited my website?’ but ‘how often did you visit my website in the

last year?’.

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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, don’t

ask people whether they like your products and your service. It could

well be that they like your products but they don’t like your service and

that makes the question impossible to answer.

4 Make sure your question it not suggestive but neutral. Formulations

like: ‘don’t 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 you’d have to ask whether they’ve 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 fill out the entire questionnaire. Give everybody the same

clear introduction. Begin with easy and non-threatening questions.

Asking for income at the beginning of a survey is not wise. Make sure

the questions follow a logical order. Pay attention to context! If you ask

people about their opinion of your products after you asked them

about your service, you could have influenced people by your previous

questions.

8 Always make sure you test your questionnaire on some individuals who

could be part of your audience.

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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.

Difference 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 different 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 fine as well. You can set up a questionnaire that

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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 fill 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 file. 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 filters, which makes it easy to analyze specific 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.

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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.

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Section

Social Mediaby Annelieke van den Berg

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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 first chapter

of this section we’ll explain what social media are and why you should

use them. In the next and final chapter of this section, we will explain

differences between social media channels and give tips how to use social

media to your advantage!

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Chapter 21

Why use social media?

What is social media?

Back in 2002, Friendster and MySpace were the first 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.

It’s 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 find it difficult 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. It’s 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 can’t say goodbye to MySpace either.

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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. That’s 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 first 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 effect: more and more people will know we have published that

article and the new and return traffic 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 can’t ignore

them any longer. Google even made its own social medium called Google+.

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It means that your site’s 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 offline, 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 you’d better make sure these are your products and

events, right?

Tweets and Facebook posts don’t get the highest rankings in Google, but

Facebook pages and profiles for sure do. See what happens when you do

a search for Yoast:

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As you can see, Google returns Yoast’s Twitter account and Facebook

page as the third and fourth result. So make sure you have these social

profiles 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 haven’t tried that jet, be sure to inves-

tigate the possibilities of Facebook advertising for your company or

product. It’s a very nice and affordable way to promote it.

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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 fit in my larger marketing

strategy?

• Which social media is most suitable for my purpose(s)?

• And of course: What’s my social media budget in terms of time and

money?

Write down your answers to the questions above and you’ll have a first

short draft of your social media strategy.

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You should make sure the strategy you work out for your website fits with

the purpose and the image of your website. Be aware of the differences

between the social media channels and use these to your advantage. You

could for instance choose to use Twitter to find 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 definitely should interact with your followers!

Social media channels

The different social media channels have distinct features, making them

applicable for different 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 definitely use Pinterest

too. And if you have a professional business, like accountancy or

consultancy, use LinkedIn.

Yoast Tip

Create a publicly accessible account and don’t 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.

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Facebook also offers 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

Twitter’s main characteristic is the 140 characters it allows for sending

messages to the world of other Twitter users. It’s for short interaction,

fast promoting of products. It’s 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.

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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 don’t find 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 aren’t very active on Google+ (this could of course be different in

your specific niche). We do recommend to create a Google+-account

anyway. The reasons for creating a Google+ account aren’t reasons having

to do with social media at all. There are other benefits 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 they’d even show your

photo in the search results but they’ve 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 influence on the authority

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of the post. While this isn’t very influential yet, it might become more

influential in the future.

Google uses this feature as well to determine who’s 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 you’re selling products and have nice pictures of these products,

you should definitely 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 someone’s 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 find 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 doesn’t mean it’s

not valuable! Companies should definitely make a LinkedIn company

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page, to make sure potential employees can find them. LinkedIn could

be useful to post job-openings and to (keep in) contact with other

companies.

LinkedIn is also very valuable to share findings 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 specific 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 profiles 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 don’t hide them

in the footer; they need to catch your visitor’s 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 first item in

a sidebar. Social buttons that seem to work best are buttons like this:

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Yoast Tip

Use social sharing buttons that mimic the style of the sites they’re

aimed at. People should recognize the social medium instantly.

Sharing buttons

Sharing buttons are used to share and / or like, recommend or retweet a

specific 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, doesn’t 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 offer 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 don’t 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. That’s why we advise you to really think about your own

social media strategy and definitely use social media on your website.

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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.

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Section

Speedby Joost de Valk

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About this section

Site speed is important for user experience as well as for SEO. It is defi-

nitely something you should be focussing on when improving your

website. In this first 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.

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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 satisfied, you need to keep

your website speed high. Of course, satisfied visitors are much more likely

to become buyers in your webshop, than dissatisfied 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, it’s 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.

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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 different when checking it from different 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 fill 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.

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Chapter 24

Increasing your site speed

Introduction

In this chapter we will first 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 files / requests;

• file size (files that are too large);

• slow responses by the web server.

We will discuss these problems in depth, while offering practical solutions.

Number of files / requests

Problem: too many files

Each page on your website is built in code. This code can be quite

complicated. A page usually consists of an HTML file, 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 files your website is built in.

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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 first one. Reducing the number of files on your page can be done in

different ways.

Solution 1: reduce number of files

The first way is to tell the users browser ‘this file 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 files

The second thing to do is combine files. JavaScript files can usually just

be concatenated and CSS files can be combined. Doing this means

that where you once had 4 JavaScript files, you might now have one.

Combining pages can improve your site’s speed tremendously.

Yoast Tip

Both the ‘far future expire time’ as well as combining of files can be

done by plugins, for instance by W3 Total Cache. Another solution is

to deal with it within your theme, by your developer.

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File size

Problem 1: file size

You know by now that your website is built in all kinds of complicated

code. These HTML, CSS and JS files often contain a lot of inline comments

and whitespace. This makes it more easily readable for your developer,

but there’s no reason why you should serve all of that to every visitor of

your site. To a browser it doesn’t make one bit of difference whether

there are a few carriage returns more or less in a document, it’ll just parse

the HTML, JS, CSS the same way as it always does. Larger HTML, JS and

CSS files makes the site speed go down.

Solution: minify

This is why you should minify those files. This, again, can be dealt with by

plugins, but it’s best if your theme has done it already. You’ll still want to

minify the JS and CSS files 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 aren’t used

inside the image. All of this makes for image files 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.

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Yoast Tip

Make sure that your image sizes aren’t 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 there’s

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 don’t 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 files from your

server and then serves them from a server they have that’s closer to your

visitor. These servers are also optimized for the delivery of static files and

because of that much faster at it.

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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.

It’s important to realize though that it’s absolutely worth it to invest in

good hosting. $5 a month for hosting is, if you’re serious about your

website, just not enough. If you can afford it, go for managed WordPress

hosting and you’ll 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 we’ve mentioned that you should be doing, we’ve

also found it to be dangerous. It’s as though you’re 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. We’ve 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.

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One of the benefits of using W3 Total Cache is that the plugin allows for

expire times per filetype. It’s obvious that a CSS file will change a lot

less often than an HTML file. 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 filetypes.

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 you’re 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.

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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 aren’t scared

off by technical stuff, you should definitely 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.