On yoast.com, we talk a lot about writing and readability. We consider it a very important part of SEO. Your text needs to be easy to follow and it needs to satisfy your users’ needs. This, in turn, will help your rankings. However, we rarely talk about how Google and other search engines read and …
Read: "How does Google understand text?"
Ranking signals, algorithm updates. One day you have the right number of keywords, the next day it’s too many. It might leave you wondering what Google wants to achieve. Or worrying what all these search changes mean for SEO in the long term. Will that change, too? Maybe you’re thinking about auditing your SEO again, …
Read: "A long term SEO strategy? Knowing what Google wants is the key"
This month, Google held their annual I/O conference, an event at which they announce new product releases and other interesting stuff. They introduced us to MUM, their new language model and the next step in understanding online content. But meeting (their) MUM wasn’t all. There was lots of SEO news in May 2021 and our …
Read: "SEO news in May 2021: Google introduces a new language model"
Natural language understanding has been a tough nut to crack, but thanks to Google’s continued investment in AI, it has reached a whole new level. At I/O 2021, Google introduced MUM — Multitask United Model. According to Google, this new language model is 1000x more powerful than BERT, released in 2019. MUM is coming to …
Read: "Google’s MUM understands what you need"
In April 2021, Google changed how they assess content which ‘reviews’ products and services. The “Product reviews update” made it harder for pages that do little more than “summarize a bunch of products” to rank highly. But, unlike many other Google updates, this one came with a cheat sheet that describes what site editors need …
Read: "What can Google’s “product reviews update” teach us about “high-quality content”?"
Google is smart, amazingly smart. The algorithm is very close to reading texts like human beings. At the same time, parts of Google’s algorithm aren’t smart at all. Computers aren’t good at understanding ‘what is what’ on a page. If you have a recipe site, you’ll need to tell Google what an ingredient is, what …
Read: "Google’s algorithm is smart and dumb at the same time"
How does Google work? What does Google actually do? For many of you, this will be fairly old news. But for everyone who is new to the world of SEO: let me explain what Google does and how SEO works. In a way that is easy to follow, because understanding this really helps you create …
Read: "What does Google do?"
Some time ago, Google caused quite a stir by announcing a new ranking factor for 2021: page experience. User experience has always been an essential part of building the best site out there, but now, it will play an even bigger role in helping you build awesome sites for your customers. All this is powered …
Read: "Learn about the three Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID & CLS"
Google’s new subtopics ranking, a page builder that’s also focusing on performance and a tool to easily rewrite and repost old content. These are a few of the news items that our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discussed during our SEO news webinar on the 26th of January 2021. Missed it? No …
Read: "The latest news in SEO and WordPress: January 2021"
It’s December, the last month of the year and that means that we’ve also had our last webinar of 2020. In this month’s edition, our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discuss the latest in Google, Facebook, WordPress and other SEO news. To give some spoilers, you can expect to hear more about …
Read: "The latest news in SEO and WordPress: December 2020"