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

3Table 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

4Sales 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

5Section

Introductionby Marieke van de Rakt

6Chapter 1

About this book

Introduction

Building a WordPress website isnt that hard. WordPress was developed

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

You can 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.

7Content of this book

This book will help you to optimize your WordPress site. The book consists

of multiple sections, which can be read in any order you like. Each section

will teach you the basics of one aspect of website optimization. Well teach

you the basics of Search Engine Optimization and explain the importance

of user interface and good navigation. Furthermore, we will give the most

important insights on improving your sales and conversions. The sections

are written by experts in the 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.

8Chapter 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.

9Why use WordPress?

Lets take a look at the advantages of using WordPress over other Content

Management Systems! You can read much more about the features and

requirements and find testimonials on WordPress.org.

Its very easy!

Making content in WordPress is very easy. Its just as easy as making a

document in Microsoft Word. You dont even have to be able to read or

write code in order to create a post in WordPress. Everybody with a little

computer skills is able to maintain his or her own blog using WordPress.

Its very 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.

Its very free!

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

its open source. So you are free to use WordPress in any way you choose:

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

on the web, WordPress has a large and supportive community. A lot of

very skilled developers work together to make WordPress even better.

You can ask questions on support forums and get help from volunteers.

WordPress is licensed under a GPL open source license, which is a pretty

complex bit of text, but it means that:

You can charge for distributing, supporting, or documenting the soft-

ware, but you cannot sell the software itself.

If you create derivative works that use pieces of code that are licensed

under the GPL, those derivative works should also be licensed under

the GPL.

That last bit is very important, it basically prevents the software from ever

becoming a proprietary piece of software.

Where to start

If you do not have a WordPress site and you would like to get started with

WordPress, you should check out WordPress.org/about.

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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 dont often dive in. With millions of users and only 12 of us, we simply

cannot answer all the questions of individual users ourselves.

That being said, we want to stress that all of our products are open source

and we are big believers in the power of open source. In our opinion:

making money in an open source community is 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.

13

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.

Googles 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.

Googles results page

Googles 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

Its very important to have a basic understanding of how Google (and

most search engines) use links: they use the number of links pointing to a

page to determine how important that page is. Both internal (links from

the own website) as well as external links could help in the ranking of your

website in Google. Some links are more important than others: links from

websites who have a lot of links themselves are generally more important

than links from small websites.

Universal search

Next to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items,

pictures and videos in its search results. This embedment is called universal

search.

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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 Googles

algorithm. Although Googles algorithm remains secret, almost a decade

of experience in SEO has resulted in a pretty good idea about the import-

ant factors. In our view, the factors in Googles algorithm can be divided

in two categories:

1 There are on-page factors which decide the ranking of your website.

These factors include technical issues (e.g. the quality of your code)

and more textual issues (e.g. structure of your site and text, use of

words).

2 There are the 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 dont work

in the long run, and might even backfire. Googles 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 dont 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 youre

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, itll also give you the

expansions for example a till example z etc. Its a great way to

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

bersuggest.

Google Trends

While you cant 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.

Its very important to check Google Trends if you expect that some of

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

seasons etc.

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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 didnt get any results:

this was stuff people were expecting but didnt find, its 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 dont 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.

24

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 sites 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!

Well give you an example of step 1 to 3. Lets say that I have a blog about

children. I write about childrens clothes, childrens room and childrens

toys. I blog about new products, about things that I have bought and like

and about new trends.

Step 1: mission

My mission is to describe the latest trends about clothing, decoration and

toys for children.

Step 2: keywords

childrens clothes childrens clothes trends

childrens room childrens room accessories

childrens room furniture childrens room accessories trends

childrens decorations childrens decorations trends

childrens toys childrens toys trends

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Step 3: pages

Searchterms

level 1:homepage.com

level 2:/subpages

level 3: /sub/subpages

level 4: sub/sub/subpages

Childrensclothes

homepage.com/clothing

Childrensclothes trends

/clothing/ trends

Childrensroom

homepage.com/room

Childrensroom accessoires

/room/ accessoires

Childrens room accessoires trends

/room/acces-soires/trends

Figure 2: pages

Now, of course Did we make the right choice?

27

As you can see from this Google Trends chart, kids clothes, for instance, is

actually far more sought after. Which means we could go after the probably

less competitive, childrens clothes etc anyway, or go for kids clothes. There

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

youre making this decision.

Cornerstone articles

Important content

Really important content deserves a page within your sites structure, not

a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks. We

refer to these important pages as cornerstone articles. So, you go ahead

and create these cornerstone pages within your site. Take some time

for it, this is going to be the content thats going to make you rank. Real

people will read it and you need to convince those people. So think about

search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that

will end up on that page and give him / her something worthwhile. This

also means youre not going to create other pages within your site that

target the exact same keyword, but if you discuss the keyword, you link to

this page! Read more about site structure in chapter 5.

28

Yoast Tip

Make sure that these cornerstone articles, the articles on which

people enter your site, have a clear call-to-action. This means that it

will be clear at the end of the page (and preferably on the top as well)

what you want people to do. Do you want them to keep on reading:

lead them to other, preferably related articles. Do you want them to

buy your 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 sites structure determines

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

easily it will find and index content relevant to your sites purpose and

intent. In this chapter, we will explain the importance of site structure and

give practical tips which will help you set up or upgrade the structure of

your own website. This chapter is a revision of a previous article written

in 2011 and published on yoast.com.

Creating a pyramid

By creating a good structure, you can use the content youve written that

has attracted links from others. Your sites structure can help to spread

some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial

site, that means that you can use the quality content youve written to

boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.

When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to

draw out your sites structure in something like Visio (or even putting it in

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

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

30

as a tree. After drawing your sites structure, you can analyze the faults in

the structure of your website.

Based on a yoast.com structure from many years ago, you would

draw something like 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 youre rethinking your site

structure youll often find that some pages are not really beneficial

to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if thats

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, thats

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

Naming your sections

Once youre 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 its own section, you can bet

people are searching for it as well. Thats why its very wise to make sure

your section names use the keywords people are searching for! Pick the

right names for your sections and subsections, and youre halfway there.

Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make

sure to keep them short and clean.

For example, if youre like us and youve written WordPress

plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that

section WordPress. What would people search for? If they want a

new plugin for WordPress, they would probably use WordPress

plugins for a search term. That would also be the term for that

section. Our sections had names as shown in 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 youre going to connect the sections

of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside

your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to

all its subpages, and the other way around. So, al the subpages within a

pyramid should link to the page at the top of the pyramid.

Because youre linking from pages that are closely related to each other

content-wise, youre increasing your sites possibility to rank. Doing it like

this, will help the search engine out by showing it whats related and

what isnt.

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

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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 its only related to

plugin 4.

From your new site structure to URLs

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

the URLs for this structure. Each pages URL should describe the content

of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what

keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important

ones in your URLs.

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Keep in mind the following things while implementing your new URLs

If youre using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.

Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-go, as Unix and Linux servers

are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the

possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/

LiKe/ThiS/ ?

Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remem-

bering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will

remember it and link to it is smaller dont use numbers in URLs.

Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs

they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.

Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents

using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this

way search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the

new one. For example, make sure http://example.com 301 redirects to

http://www.example.com, or the other way around, so people always

link to the same version of your site.

Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for

example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. Theres no

valid reason anymore to have a 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 its

not green, youve 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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1Robots.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. Its not uncommon at all that if a developer

moves your new site from a development server to yours, copying the

robots.txt along, that he / she forgets to update it, leaving your site

blocked from crawling.

Testing a change to your robots.txt is easy: in Google Webmaster Tools

under Crawl Blocked URLs there are two textareas. The 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 dont know how to use Google

Webmaster Tools, start reading here.

2Noindex tags

Sometimes people want some pages not to be indexed by Google. Maybe

you do not want your personal blog in the search results, but you do

want to show it on your website. You can use a noindex tag in the HTML

in order to keep Google from indexing your site. However, sometimes

these tags are written in pages where they should not have been.

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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:

A noindex tag on a page results to no saving of this page in Googles

index. This page will not rank in Google on any search terms. You want

that meta robots tag to read:

The follow part in the tag tells a search engine that all links on your page

should be followed by the search engine for further indexing of your

website. If you dont specify any meta robots tags (most pages on the web

dont), the default is for that page to allow both indexation and following,

so the default is index,follow.

3Wrong canonical

If you have two pages holding the same content, thats problematic for

your rankings. To 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 dont 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 youre setting the canonical wrong. This could

occur for instance by inserting a link to a 404 page or simply a non-existing

URL in that canonical link. Also, if your canonical link refers to a page

which is actually very 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. Its a powerful tool, use it wisely.

Findability

Now that weve made sure Google can index your site, its time to tell Google

where the content is. To do that, we rely on two things: links to each page

on our website, which have been taken care of by the internal link structure

we made in chapter 5. Your sites structure determines whether a search

engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will 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 URLs of your website and keeps track

of its latest updates. The XML sitemap thus gives Google a kind of table of

content of your website. The XML sitemap are strictly meant for search

engines. They adhere to a standard created by the 3 big search engines

Yahoo!, Google and Bing, which you can find on sitemaps.org if you want

to see it. The good news is, if youre using WordPress, all you have to do is

install our WordPress SEO plugin and make sure XML sitemaps are

enabled within it. Our plugin will take care of the rest.

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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 youve done the best possible job of creating a good internal link

structure, it can still be helpful to create an HTML sitemap that allows

visitors to get an overview of all the content on your site. If your site is

very big, you might need to split this up into several sitemaps to make it

workable.

The 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 dont really like the related links plugins available for Word-

Press because theyre 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 were sure that

search engines can find our content, its time to write copy. In writing and

structuring your text, you can actually help with indexing your page even

further. Good web copy makes sure that it is both readable and useful to

visitors as well as easy to rank for search engines. So you need all the

knowledge youve gathered about keyword research and then apply that

to your text. In the next chapter we will give you some tips on how to do

just that.

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Chapter 7

SEO copywriting

Introduction

The text on your website is a very important factor in Googles algorithm.

Google spiders your text and indexes the relevant words. Your text should

thus be written in such a way that your keywords and search terms have

a prominent place. However, using your keywords too often severely

damages the readability of your text. In this chapter, we will give some

practical tips and teach you the basics of SEO copywriting.

Yoast Tip

If you want to read more about SEO copywriting, CopyBlogger is the

go to source.

Writing your text

Think before you write

Copywriting is a true profession. It can be quite hard. And copywriting in

order to optimize your website for search engines makes the job even

harder. Make sure the mission of your product (see chapter 4) is crystal

clear. Write it down. Think hard about the message of your text. What do

you want to tell your readers? And what is the purpose of your text? What

do you want you readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the

answers to these questions before you begin writing.

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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 dont use

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

childrens clothes - and you write a text which has the words childrens

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

pretty annoyed. Your text just isnt readable anymore. Keep in mind that

Google wants to facilitate its users. Users want texts that are understand-

able, well structured and easy to read.

As a general rule of thumb: try to put down your search terms in about

1 to 2 percent of your text. Make sure your articles have a minimum of

300 words. So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search

terms 3 to 6 times. The minimum of 300 words isnt an exact science,

of course, nor is the amount of keyword mentions, but 300 is a decent

minimum number of words for an article that needs to show authority.

Use of subheadings

If you write longer texts and want people to 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 Michiels posts.

47

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 youre

trying too hard. Google will then push your website down in the search

results. Always keep your audience in mind and write texts that are aimed

at your audience and easy to read.

Content writing with the WP SEO plugin

Our WP SEO plugin actually helps you to write a SEO-friendly text. If you

want the help of our plugin you should start by choosing your focus

keyword and entering it in the appropriate box. This is the most important

search term you want people to 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

49

website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it is not an

active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less

appealing to Google to include the page in the search results. Next to

that, make sure you keep your cornerstone content up to date (see

chapter 4).

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Chapter 8

Link building

Introduction

Competitiveness of niche

In chapter 3 we divided the factors influencing Googles algorithm in two

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

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

guished 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 Joosts link building article.

Bad reputation

In recent years link building has gotten a somewhat nasty reputation.

Once people noticed that links from other sites resulted in higher rankings,

they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that did not have any

relation with their own site. In other cases, people bought links from other

sites. Buying links polluted the search engine. Not the best information,

but the people who buy most links would rank high in Google if buying

links would be allowed. That is why Google gives penalties to companies

who buy links or (mis)use links from non-related companies. If you get a

penalty from Google, your site will disappear from the search results. The

bad reputation of link building comes from companies who were a bit too

enthusiastic in link building and got penalties from Google. Does this

mean that you shouldnt do any link building at all? Of course not!

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Link building the right way

Donts

When you decide to improve your ranking by doing some link building,

make sure you never pay for links. Never use services of companies that

tell you they can get you some links. If the links your website gets are from

sites that are unreliable (e.g. if there are only advertisements on the site),

you should get rid of them.

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

from people reading an article and clicking through, its not going to be a

very valuable link. Search engines are getting better and better at under-

standing which links truly connect the web and which are just there to

fool the search engine.

Outreaching PR-activity

Link building is an outreaching PR-activity. Link building should generate

visitors to your site that actually 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

shouldnt 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 its perfectly

OK. If youre going to do it at scale and reproduce the same content all

the time: that wont work.

Yoast Tip

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

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

54

Search Engine Optimization

Further reading

In this section, we have taught you the basics of Search Engine Optimi-

zation. If you want to know more about SEO we recommend you to read

our WordPress SEO article: The 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

56

About this section

In this section, we will teach you the basics of a good navigation. Navigation

is everything that has to do with guiding your visitors through your

website. You should help your visitors to 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 well 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.

57

Chapter 9

Introduction to navigation

Why do we need navigation?

Imagine yourself being lost. Being lost without knowing how far you have

to travel. Without any sense of where you are and especially no sense of

where you need to go. Thats probably how your visitor will feel when your

website would lack any navigational features.

Many navigational elements

Luckily every website seems to have some kind of navigation. Navigational

features are not limited to your menu and submenu. There are many ways

of navigating through your website, although we do not label these as

such. In fact, we recommend making your menu as short as possible, and

trust the visitor will 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.

58

Figure 7: imaginary map of your web page.

Travelling your website

In Jonathan Swifts well-known novel Gullivers Travels (1726), we find a

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

Defoes 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 were sure youll be able to come up with more. The following

chapters are meant to make you recognise and use the navigational

options your site has, to improve your user experience, usability and SEO

along the way.

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Chapter 10

Top menu navigation: coming in from the North

Now lets imagine a visitor travelling over

your web page, entering from the upper

left the North - of your browser.

The Back button

One of the most clicked features in a

browser is probably the Back button of

the browser itself. If we end up on a page

where we cant find what we are looking

for, a simple click will bring us back to a

page we already know. Its as simple as that. The quickest escape from

an un wanted situation.

Unfortunately, the Back button is not something we can control. The use

of it however clearly tells us that we need clear crossroads in our website.

We need to have pages that redirect us to other sections of the website.

A page is never a dead end, there should always be a way back.

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Yoast Tip

Make sure your visitors cant get lost. Make sure that every page

has a clear escape to get back to the previous page and to the

homepage.

Top navigation

We refer to the navigation options entirely on top of your website (above

your main menu) as top navigation. The top navigation is often over-

looked, but provides valuable background information for your website.

Some websites include home and contact links in the top navigation.

These are actually often a bit too important to put in your top navigation.

You would want a more prominent place for these.

When dividing your website in topics, you will find yourself left with a

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

in any way. Lets 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 youve set up your web

pages the right way.

Logo links to homepage

It would be a wasted navigational option not to link that logo. Even on

your sales pages, where you may have reduced all noise by getting rid of

your main menu, the logo lighthouse will provide a nice, warm link back to

your homepage. Every ship lost at sea will then 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. Its not always a horizontal naviga-

tion and its not always global, but that is just one of the terms introduced

to indicate the main menu on your website. Other names are top-level,

persistent or primary navigation. But in the end its your main menu,

right?

The main menu indicates the various sections of your website in a clear

and informative way. That global navigation should consist of a number

(not too much) main menu items that tell the visitor which corner of

your website should be visited for what information. In chapter 5 we

already gave practical insights in structuring your website. Your main

menu should 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

Youll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Bread-

crumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like: Home

WordPress WordPress Plugins. They are good for two things. First of all,

they allow your users to easily navigate through your site. And secondly,

they allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more

easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category

the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one.

Yoast Tip

The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin actually helps you to create bread-

crumbs fairly easy.

Make sure your website has a nice internal structure, like discussed in

chapter 5. We often hear people say things like: My website only has two

layers: home and the page at hand. So breadcrumbs are useless. Our ques-

tion in this case would immediately be: Why havent you structured your

content a bit better? Breadcrumbs make valuable internal links, and

provide a simple, structural navigation. If your website has multiple levels

of content, you want breadcrumbs.

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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 dont mind scrolling. We love long, textual content. If you

want to be the authority on a subject, you should be able to write a whole

lot about it. Thats also how Google will see this. If you want a page to

rank with three lines of text, even Google will smile and give you lower

rankings for the page or not rank you at all (see also chapter 7 on SEO

copy writing).

Now with long pages, there is a simple way to improve usability of that

page: by adding on-page navigation. Just create links that refer to a place

in the article below. At yoast.com, we use this for instance for our main

SEO for WordPress article. There is actually quite a lengthy index on that

page. An added 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. Were 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 youre listing 10 articles per

page, that would give you a hundred archive pages. If you would link these

pages just by adding an Older (Previous) posts link and a Newer (Next)

posts link, that would mean you would have to click 99 times to get to the

last page. There is no need to make it that hard.

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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 dont want to click each page to get

to page 50.

Figure 10: you should be able to skip pages.

Categorizing and tagging your content

WordPress 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

dont convey much meaning. But if you added another taxonomy called

Region, itd be immediately obvious that those should hold all the keywords

related to the location of the article. You could add this as a hierarchical

taxonomy and create a Continent Country Region structure, or you

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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 theyre

looking for a specific topic. And that was our goal, wasnt it?

Make taxonomies visible!

A lot of people forget to make their taxonomies visible to a visitor. What

would be the use of these taxonomies in that case? So your posts are

nicely archived for yourself? That would be a waste of that taxonomy. In

some themes, the categories and tags are instantly shown as you add

them to your post. But, some themes neglect to do so. You should make

sure these tags and categories are in fact shown, preferably at the bottom

of your article.

Taxonomies can go wrong!

A lot could go wrong with taxonomies when people start using them

randomly. The structure of your taxonomies is important. As taxonomies

group your content, you should keep in mind where these could be used,

how they are used and where they are linked. Do not create too many

categories. Do not create too many tags. Make sure tags are used more

than once or twice.

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Yoast Tip

Dont go creating a list of categories longer than Rapunzels hair. That

will mean you have probably gone overboard creating categories.

We usually recommend eight to ten categories. If you need more,

you might consider adding more taxonomies, not categories. If half

of your categories is about people, why not add a People taxonomy

instead.

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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 theyre looking for.

The sidebar is suitable for a number of

lists and widgets.

Listings

The sidebar is especially well suited for a

few types of listings. In chapter 11 we already discussed taxonomies,

categories and tags. Taxonomies are great navigational features. People

can easily grasp the structure of your website by navigating through your

taxonomies. A list of your categories could also be added to your sidebar

providing this list is not too long. Adding a list with 100 categories in your

sidebar, would be plain stupid. Please keep the total number of links per

page around 50 max. That might seem a bit low for your website, but if

you keep your menu short and focussed and do not add a surplus of

unnecessary links to your sidebar and footer, youll really have to push to

get 50 links on that page.

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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

doesnt matter if these posts are company related or deal with market

insights. If you frequently update your blog (or news section), that recent

posts section in your sidebar will be 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 youve built an

active community around your website or brand, comments could be a

way for the community to make themselves heard.

Yoast Tip

A recent comments widget can be very helpful! People might

comment on a post using keywords they use themselves in search,

which might help you rank for these as well or at least invite you to

vary your keyword use with these alternatives. But comments might

also give you ideas for new posts. Showing you have an active

community will entice others to visit your blog section as well.

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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,

lets rephrase that: There are two types of

footers, the one with just the copyright

and some extra links, and footers that

contain footer blocks with information.

That information can be an address, a

short contact form, payment options or

quality and security marks. But there most

probably will also be links.

Footer links

What not to do?

When adding links to your footer, always wonder if that link deserves to be

tucked away in that footer. Repeating your main menu items for instance.

Now why would you want to do that? Your menu is already on that page

and if you want that menu to be available for the visitor that scrolled all

the way down, why not simply stick that menu to the top of the browser?

Hence the name sticky menu. When we decided to build themes, the

(mobile and) sticky menu were the first things we decided these themes

should have. Its 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 isnt 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 visitors 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. Were not just

referring to your telephone number. If, for instance, your sidebar

contains a list of categories, make sure one can click one link at a

time, and the sidebar is not crammed with links, so clicking one is

nearly impossible without zooming. There needs to be sufficient

white space around that link.

Mobile menu

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

menu seems logical: its a space saver. Most menus drop down to the

bottom, but some fold out to the left or right. The main advantage of the

left menu is that you can use the entire height of the screen for the navi-

gation, where for instance the much used TwentyTwelve theme by

WordPress has this drop down menu below the logo/site name, meaning

there is less vertical space to use for the menu. On the other hand, that

might help you to keep your menu short and focused.

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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 shouldnt you? Thumb-thickness is a factor in how

useful these links are on a mobile websites. Also take line height in

account.

Figure 14: two examples of line height

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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 well guide you in improv-

ing your webshop. We will use insights from psychology which are useful

in directing your visitors and give some tips about what you should think

about to close the deal. In the 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 a