Digital marketing

February 7, 2018, marks the release of a brand new course in the Yoast Academy : Multilingual SEO. The Multilingual SEO training is for every site owner, developer or SEO who targets people in various locales and languages. The time-limited introductory price will be $169. After a week, it will go to its regular price of $199. Don’t miss this great Multilingual SEO course! Loads of sites target consumers from other countries. Sometimes these consumers even speak another language. Targeting these customers with a well-thought-out SEO strategy takes some work, and many sites fail to deliver. Wouldn’t it be great to get some help reaching those customers in other countries? We know it can be a struggle setting everything up correctly so we’d like to help you. That’s why, on February 7, we’re launching the Multilingual SEO course. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll let you know when it’s available! » According to Yoast founder and CEO Joost de Valk, many sites make mistakes when impl...

If your online business is doing well in your country, you might consider expanding to international markets. To be successful in new markets requires some extra investments in SEO though. You’d better start thinking about multilingual SEO, if you want to be sure your website will be found and used well in other countries! Here, I’ll explain what multilingual SEO is, why it’s important and which elements it consists of. What is multilingual SEO? Multilingual SEO deals with offering optimized content for multiple languages or multiple locations. Let’s explain this with an example. Imagine you have an online shop: you sell WordPress plugins in many countries. To increase your sales in Germany, you’ve decided to translate your content into German and create a German site. Now, you have two variations of the same page: an English and German version. Pretty straight-forward, you’d say? Well, there’s more. Especially if you want to target countries with similar languages or countries where...

Video games have become one of the most popular forms of media over the past few decades, with videogame consoles becoming a household staple. One of the factors that affected its rapid growth was the emergence of the internet. In fact, gaming searches account for a good amount of search queries on a regular basis. With search engines playing a big part in gaming, utilizing SEO strategies for gaming sites is one of the most effective ways to improve visibility and authority. SEO strategies for gaming sites vary differently from other websites and requires a good amount of research and planning before implementing them. Here is a guide to some of the best SEO strategies that you can use on your gaming site, along with some important steps that will help you reach your target audience. Major Factors to Consider The world of gaming is massive, and with numerous gaming-related content available on the internet, it is a highly competitive world that would see you struggle without prope...

The chatter amongst the SEOratti is that Voice Search, AI, Machine Learning and SkyNet are a-coming and you better either get ready or prepare for extinction. If it pleases Twitter, in rebuttal, may I present Exhibit #532 in the case for Shotland’s Law (“The better something looks on the surface, the worse it looks underneath”). Google only surfaces the best people for your money or your life. H/t @LennyPham pic.twitter.com/ipJ8JRLnIA — Dan Leibson (@DanLeibson) January 29, 2018 Even those slick Japanese Blade Runner toilets inevitably get clogged and need a plumber… Search “I need a financial advisor” on mobile Safari. http://ift.tt/2DNtXjy

7 Mobile-Friendly Navigation Best Practices was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips . It’s now 2018, and we are officially living in a mobile-first world. In fact, Google has begun the switch to a mobile-first index — which means Google will rank your website based on your mobile content, relevance and UX. Your mobile navigation (menus and internal links) contribute to all three. Good mobile navigation makes it easy for people to find what they need, without bogging down page speed or cluttering the screen. It also needs to keep PageRank flowing to the important pages that you want to rank well in search. Site navigations historically included everything on a site in huge, multi-tiered lists. On mobile, that approach doesn’t work. It looks cluttered. It requires scrolling. And it causes your visitors to bounce away. Here I’ll lay out seven mobile-friendly navigation best practices that make life easier for people visiting your bu...

This is just one of the many misconceptions about the  Yoast SEO readability feedback we’re happy to set straight. We’ve often been telling you to go chase those green bullets. The bullets are a key part of the Yoast SEO plugin. The Yoast SEO bullets serve to give intuitive feedback on your text and gamify the Yoast SEO experience. Trying to get all green bullets can become an addiction, but it isn’t necessarily the best way of creating great copy. Over the years, we’ve seen all kinds of misconceptions about the green bullets on social media and in our support channels. Let’s discuss some of them to get a feel for how to approach the bullets feedback. 1. I have some red and orange bullets, so I will never rank! Generally, the more green bullets, the more SEO fit your text is, as we’ve told you in other post on this site. But not every bullet has to be green . The bullets indicate strengths and weaknesses in your text. They can help you easily identify some elements you could impr...

If you use Google Maps to navigate from place to place, or if you have agreed to be a local guide for Google Maps, there is a chance that you have seen Google Mobile Location history information. There is a Google Account Help page about how to Manage or delete your Location History . The location history page starts off by telling us: Your Location History helps you get better results and recommendations on Google products. For example, you can see recommendations based on places you’ve visited with signed-in devices or traffic predictions for your daily commute. You may see this history as your timeline, and there is a Google Help page to View or edit your timeline . This page starts out by telling us: Your timeline in Google Maps helps you find the places you’ve been and the routes you’ve traveled. Your timeline is private, so only you can see it. Mobile Location history has been around for a while, and I’ve seen it mentioned in a few Google patents. It may be referred to ...

In the world of digital analytics, automation is one the biggest keys to ensuring you obtain maximum value from how and where you spend your time. Automation is the mindset of spending time upfront to save you time in the future. … http://ift.tt/2DUky96

Technology evolves and changes over time. There was a park in the town in Virginia where I used to live that had been a railroad track that was turned into a walking path. At one place near that track was a historic turntable where cargo trains might be unloaded so that they could be added to later trains or trains headed in the opposite direction. This is a technology that is no longer used but it is an example of how technology changes and evolves over time. There are people who write about SEO who have insisted that Google uses a technology called Latent Semantic Indexing to index content on the Web, but make those claims without any proof to back them up. I thought it might be helpful to explore that technology and its sources in more detail. It is a technology that was invented before the Web was around, to index the contents of document collections that don’t change much. LSI might be like the railroad turntables that used to be used on railroad lines. There is also a website w...

One of the inventors of the newly granted patent I am writing about was behind one of the most visited Google patents I’ve written about, from Ross Koningstein, which I posted about under the title, The Google Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent It described a social engineering approach to stop site owners from using spammy tactics to raise the ranking of pages. This new patent is about targeted advertising at Google in paid search, which I haven’t written too much about here. I did write one post about paid search, which I called, Google’s Second Most Important Algorithm? Before Google’s Panda, there was Phil I started that post with a quote from Steven Levy, the author of the book In the Plex , which goes like this: They named the project Phil because it sounded friendly. (For those who required an acronym, they had one handy: Probabilistic Hierarchical Inferential Learner.) That was bad news for a Google Engineer named Phil who kept getting emails about the system. He begged Harik...

There could be a reason why you’d want to switch your top level domain (TLD) at some point. Perhaps you want to use it in your brand name , or maybe you just want something that catches the eye a bit more. But what if your site isn’t performing as well as you thought it would after you’ve made the switch? Is the new TLD you picked to blame? Or could there be another reason for that drop in traffic? Whatever your reasons for changing, there are some things to keep in mind before concluding that your rankings have dropped permanently. Let’s get into that in this Ask Yoast! Manolo Macchetta emailed us his question from Milan: I had a .info domain but I changed it to a .xyz domain. Traffic is much lower now. Do you know if new TLDs rank as well as others? Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer! Things to keep in mind when changing your TLD “Well, your question leads to many more questions in my head. First of all, did you 301 redirect the old dom...

Off-page SEO is about everything that doesn’t happen directly on your website. Optimizing your website is called on-page SEO and includes things like site structure, content and speed optimizations. Off-page SEO is about, among other things, link building, social media and local SEO. Or in other words, generating traffic to your site and making your business appear like the real deal it is. In this post, we answer the question: What is off-page SEO? New to SEO? Learn the Basics of SEO in our Basic SEO course » $199 - Buy now » Info Creating exposure, trust and brand awareness When focusing on on-page SEO , you’re doing everything in your power to make your site awesome. You write great content, have a solid site structure and your mobile site loads in just a couple of seconds. All is well in the world. Off-page SEO on the other hand, helps you to bring in those hordes of visitors and potential customers. Both are important pieces of the puzzle. By writing quality content you c...

We have previously discussed how Google My Business helps improve local SEO for businesses and makes it visible in search results pages. One of the important points that was discussed was how adding a virtual tour would be beneficial in increasing audience interest. Virtual tours give your audience a visual idea of how your business looks like before they even visit their, and that makes for one big first impression what can be a deciding factor on whether or not they would like your service. Adding a virtual tour on your Google My Business page may look simple at a glance, but it would take good effort to take some attractive 360-degree images that presents your business well. Here is a short guide on how to create your own virtual tour, along with reasons why you should do this for your business. The first thing that you need to know before even taking pictures for your Google My Business Virtual Tour is to make sure that you get to comply with the image requirements. This consi...