Joost de Valk,

Annelieke van den Berg,

Michiel Heijmans,
Marieke van de Rakt,
Thijs de Valk

Optimize your
WordPress site
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
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

4
 Section

Introduction
by Marieke van de Rakt

5
 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.

6
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.

12
 Section

Search Engine Optimization

by Joost de Valk

13
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.

14
 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

15
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.

17
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

18
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.

19
 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

21
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.

22
• 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.

Search level 1: level 2: level 3: / sub / level 4: sub / 

terms homepage / subpages subpages 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

25
Step 3: pages

Search level 1: level 2: level 3: / sub / level 4: sub / 

terms homepage.com / subpages subpages sub /subpages

Children’s homepage.
clothes com / clothing

Children’s / clothing /
clothes trends trends

Children’s homepage.
room com / room

Children’s / room /
room accessoires accessoires

Children’s room / room /acces-

accessoires trends soires /trends

Figure 2: pages

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

26
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.

27
 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.

28
 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

29
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:

Home

Blog Code About Projects Sites Contact

WordPress Articles Tool 1 Tool 2 Etc. Project 1 Site 1

Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Project 2 Site 2

page 1 page 2 page 1 page 2 page page

Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Etc. Etc.

page 3 page 4 page 3 page 4

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.

30
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.

Home

Blog Code About Projects Sites Contact

WordPress Articles Tool 1 Tool 2 Etc. Project 1 Site 1

Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Project 2 Site 2

page 1 page 2 page 1 page 2 page page

Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Etc. Etc.

page 3 page 4 page 3 page 4

31
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.

Home

Blog Code About Projects Sites Contact

WordPress Articles Tool 1 Tool 2 Etc. Project 1 Site 1

Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Project 2 Site 2

page 1 page 2 page 1 page 2 page page

Sub- Sub- Sub- Sub- Etc. Etc.

page 3 page 4 page 3 page 4

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.

32
 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.

Home / Blog

WordPress Articles Code About Contact

Subpage 1 Subpage 1 Tool 1 Websites

Subpage 2 Subpage 2 Tool 2 Projects

Subpage 3 Subpage 3 Etc.

Subpage 4 Subpage 4

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.
33
 Another choice we made was to move the blog to the home­page.
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.

34
 SEO Blog

WordPress SEO Code About

Contact
Plugins Tools Snippets Joost de Valk

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.

35
 Take figure 6 as an example:

SEO Blog

WordPress
Plugins

Plugin 1 Plugin 2

Plugin 3 Plugin 4

Subpage 1 Subpage 2

Subpage 3 Subpage 4

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.

36
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.

37
 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.

38
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.

39
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.

40
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.

41
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.

42
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.

43
 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.

44
 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.

45
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.

46
 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.

47
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

48
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).

49
 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.

50
• 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!

51
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!

52
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.

53
 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!

54
 Section

Navigation
by Michiel Heijmans
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.

56
 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.

57
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

58
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.

59
 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 un­wanted 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.

60
 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:

Login Sitemap Documentation

Terms How-to Register Support

Search Contact Feedback RSS

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,

62
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.

63
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
copy­writing).

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; Figure 13: TwentyTwelve: drop

drop down to the bottom 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

Sales
by Thijs de Valk

82
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,

Woo­Commerce 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

86
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.

88
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

Analytics
by Annelieke van den Berg

95
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

97
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 Research
by 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 Media
by Annelieke van den Berg

128
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

Speed
by 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.

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