Get ready for our FREE training: SEO for beginners

Want to know what makes your site rank higher in Google? Understand how Google works? This is your chance to learn it… for free! For the first time ever, we’re launching a completely free course: the SEO for beginners training. In this course, you’ll take your first steps in the world of Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO. The course will be launched on May 7 and is easy, fun and free! So what’s stopping you?

Learn what to do to make your web traffic grow. Create a My Yoast user account now and we’ll give you access to the course on May 7!

Why take this course?

You want to rank higher

Whatever your expertise is, whether you’re a hairdresser, a consultant or a plumber, you probably have a website. And you want it to rank on top in Google. But what if the competition is outranking you? You can beat them through search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is the art of creating a website that search engines and users like. This can give you a head start on the competition that’s still in the dark about SEO. In the SEO for beginners training, you’ll learn why Google likes certain websites more than others. So you’ll know what to improve on your own website.

It’s easy

As this course is for beginners, it doesn’t matter if you know nothing about SEO or not so much about websites yet! We won’t use too many technical terms. We want everyone with a website to be able to understand what makes one website better than the other.

It’s fun and for free!

And on top of that, it’s free and much fun to do! You’ll get access to over two hours of instructional videos, lots of reading material, and challenging quizzes to train what you’ve learned. 

What will you learn?

In this training, you’ll learn which factors make a website rank high in Google’s search results. It will give you a fundamental understanding of how search engines work. You’ll learn about keywords, why they are important and how to choose them well. Also, you’ll get insight in writing SEO-friendly posts and how structuring your site well can improve your rankings.

Why is this course free?

At Yoast we believe in fair changes in the search results for everyone. We think SEO isn’t something only the big companies should be able to do. Small businesses or non-profit organizations, or great ideas in general should get a platform and should be easy to find on the internet as well. That’s why our Yoast SEO plugin is for free, you get a free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter and next week we’ll even add a free course to the list!

How do you get access?

As of May 7 you’ll be able to enroll in this course. It’s completely free. If you don’t want to miss it you can already create a My Yoast account. The course will be automatically added to your account on May 7. We’ll send you an email when it’s available!

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from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/get-ready-for-our-free-training-seo-for-beginners/

Duplicate content: causes and solutions

Content is king – 20% off our SEO copywriting training

How to add HowTo structured data to your how-to article

Ask Yoast: Google ranking the ‘wrong’ page for keyword

Personal configuration review: Train your skills and get our feedback

Today we’re launching the Personal configuration review: an extra personal assignment you can add to the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training. You can now test if you’ve understood the subject matter of our training well and do an extra assignment – on your own site! When you’ve configured Yoast SEO on your site, we’ll check it for you and give you personal feedback. This assignment is only available in combination with our plugin training. Buy them together now for only $99!

Get The Yoast SEO Training + Configuration Review Now$99 (ex VAT) for training and assignment

What is it?

The Personal configuration review is an extension of the existing Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training. In this new assignment we’ll take you by the hand and guide you through the settings of Yoast SEO, like the Search appearance section, the integration with Google Search Console and the Social tab. For instance, we’ll help you decide which content you should have indexed and which not. Get ready to apply the skills you’ve learned in the training!

You can only do this assignment when you buy the Yoast SEO for WordPress training. We recommend doing that because it will give you the opportunity to test your comprehension of the Yoast SEO plugin. And even better, you’ll know directly if Yoast SEO is configured optimally for your type of website.

How does it work?

Adding this extra assignment to your course is easy! Just follow these steps:

1. Buy the course and the assignment together (the assignment is only available as an extension of the training).
2. After you’ve finished the course you’ll get access to the Personal configuration review assignment.
3. Get started and configure Yoast SEO on your own website with help of the assignment.
4. Once you’re done inform us that you’ve finished it and grant us access to the backend of your WordPress Install via a guest account.
5. We’ll check your configuration and we’ll provide personal feedback by email.
6. If you’ve set it up well, you’ll get an additional certificate and badge.

Why this assignment?

At Yoast we want to deliver the best online SEO courses. We believe good training requires some personal attention. That’s why we’ll top up more courses with assignments that will be checked by members of our team in the future. Because nothing is more valuable than true customized feedback by SEO professionals!

Get The Yoast SEO Training + Configuration Review Now$99 (ex VAT) for training and assignment

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from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/personal-configuration-review/

What is local SEO?

We researched longer meta descriptions: here are our findings

Ask Yoast: Keep or delete and redirect event pages?

SEO basics: What is HTTP/2?

Caroline’s Corner: How to kill that inner critic

Is Facebook evil? Aren’t we all?

Yoast SEO 7.3: Import all the things

SEO basics: What is keyword research?

Ask Yoast: Optimizing for audio podcasts

eCommerce usability: the ultimate guide

On Google’s related entities patent: Write awesome posts!

Basic SEO: What are crawl errors?

Annelieke’s Analytics: What are sessions in Google Analytics?

What’s this Gutenberg thing I keep hearing about?

Writing with Gutenberg

Ask Yoast: Preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Yoast conference update: Where were we in March?

Caroline’s Corner: Finding inspiration for your next blog post

SEO basics: The difference between tags and categories

Yoast SEO 7.2: Fixes and improvements

These past few weeks were all about the 7.0 release of Yoast SEO. That release brought many changes and made a lot of SEO work easier to understand and do. In 7.1 we fixed some bugs, improved the importers and added a new language to our roster: Portuguese. Yoast SEO 7.2 — out now — is taking it a bit easier. No substantial new features, but enough improvements all around.

Better import from All in One SEO Pack

Over the past few releases, we’ve been steadily improving and enhancing the data importers in Yoast SEO. We’re slowly getting there and Yoast SEO 7.2 adds another new enhancement to one particular importer: the one for All in One SEO Pack. As of now, we can import noindex, nofollow and OpenGraph tags from this WordPress SEO plugin. Also, we’ve fixed a bug that could overwrite existing Yoast SEO data when importing data from All in One SEO Pack.

Bug fixes in Yoast SEO 7.2

As always, we ran into bugs that we needed to fix. Some we uncover ourselves, while others are handed to us by our highly valued community. In Yoast SEO 7.2, we needed to fix several bugs. Some are very small, like the Ryte notification that didn’t go away when users turned the feature. But some are more serious, like a bug where attachments connected to password-protected posts ended up in the sitemaps.

A couple of other fixes were related to the wpseo_robots filter where setting a page to noindex did not correctly remove the canonical element. In Yoast SEO Premium, there were issues regarding the handling of changes in parent/child relationships of pages; we have resolved these all. Of course, you can check the changelog for Yoast SEO 7.2 to see what else was fixed.

What are you waiting for: update now!

With every release, we keep the ball rolling at Yoast HQ. We’re finetuning, fixing and improving anywhere we can. Since Yoast SEO is open source, you can help us make Yoast SEO even better. Why don’t you follow our GitHub account to see what we’re working on? If you have issues, features request or enhancements don’t be afraid to post them. Please follow the instructions in the Yoast Contribution Guidelines.

This wraps up our bi-weekly release update. We now just have one more assignment for you: update now!

Read more: ‘Why every website needs Yoast SEO’ »

The post Yoast SEO 7.2: Fixes and improvements appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-7-2/

Is Fact Check for Yoast SEO a joke?

Yesterday we released a new add-on to Yoast SEO: Fact check for Yoast SEO 1.4. Were you getting excited to use it already? Then we’re very sorry to disappoint you, but it’s an April Fools’ joke. Or is it…? Our dear colleagues Danny and Irene genuinely built this plugin. Read this short interview and learn why and how they did that!

Is the Fact Check plugin a joke?

Yes. We’ve created Fact Check as an April Fools’ joke. The plugin is not to be taken seriously, except when you are planning on writing posts about conspiracy theories.

Irene and Danny, doing some daily fact checking

Why did Yoast make this plugin?

A couple of years ago, when we were writing the code for the Yoast SEO readability analysis, we thought of all the cool things we could do with the text analysis. Almost all the building blocks we needed for this April Fools’ plugin were already there in our library. We even came up with almost all of the current conspiracy checks back then. However, we’d never built it. Until now. We thought it was a fun idea for an April Fools’ joke. Besides, it gave us the possibility to learn some things about Webpack, Grunt and Babel and extending the existing Yoast SEO plugin.

Will the plugin do my website or my SEO any harm?

No, not at all. The added checks in Fact Check for Yoast SEO only add some bullets with feedback. As long as you don’t actually add conspiracies in your texts, having this plugin in your WordPress install will not change a thing.

How could we have known that this is a joke?

The plugin was released on April 1st. That should be a dead giveaway. Furthermore, the version is 1.4. Also, in the release video we’ve put a couple of hints. The most visible hint was the ‘I want to believe’ wallpaper on the computer in the background. Next to that, there was a Beatles record on the table. The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is rumored to contain a number of hints that confirm that Paul McCartney is dead. We’ve also put a subliminal message on one of the screens. In the shots of the screen of the notebook, you can read ‘Don’t let Google fool you, buy Yoast SEO Premium!’ if you pause the video at the right moment. Finally, the outro of the video contains a number of beeps. These beeps are morse code, and spell out “April 1”.

Can I still trust Yoast?

Of course you can. We like the occasional joke, but we understand a lot of people use our software daily and rely on our feedback in Yoast SEO or Yoast SEO Premium. That is why we created a separate plugin for this joke, instead of interfering with the workings of Yoast SEO itself.

What can I use this plugin and its code for?

The Fact Check plugin is a nice example of how easy it is to extend the Yoast SEO plugin. The plugin is, like most of our software, open source, and everyone who would like to know how it works, can take a look at the code, or fork it into a new project. You can find the code on GitHub.

The post Is Fact Check for Yoast SEO a joke? appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/is-fact-check-for-yoast-seo-a-joke/

Get our new free plugin: Fact Check for Yoast SEO 1.4 Beta

While developing and benchmarking for new releases of Yoast SEO, we keep a keen eye on requests made by users. An issue that consistently raises concerns is the uprise of fake news. So today, we present Fact Check for Yoast SEO 1.4 Beta, a free add-on for our Yoast SEO plugin.

Download Fact Check for Yoast SEO 1.4 Beta»

Why this add-on?

Fake news is on the rise and it’s a world-wide problem. People and companies are losing grip on on the authenticity of sources and the trustworthiness of their message. What sources are authentic? What makes a source reliable? And more importantly: how do you decide for yourself?

Currently, the Yoast SEO plugin runs several checks on your content. Readability, the use of keywords and internal linking: we help you optimize your text. Today, we’re launching an add-on that adds multiple new checks to the original ones: so-called fact checks.

At Yoast we believe that you should be the best result. And the best result has to be true. Fact Check for Yoast SEO integrates seamlessly with Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium. This plugin scans your text and gives you feedback about the stated facts. This will allow you to only write believable content.

Test our beta!

Please help us test this beta, so we can publish it on the WordPress repository soon. If you find a bug or would like to help improve this plugin, you can leave your feedback by creating an issue here. Like Yoast SEO, the Fact Check add-on is open source. The source code can be found on GitHub.

Download Fact Check for Yoast SEO 1.4 Beta »

Installation instructions

1. Download the zip above.
2. In the WordPress backend, go to Plugins > Add new > Upload plugin.
3. Click ‘Choose file’ or ‘Browse’ (depending on your browser).
4. Select the zip and click ‘Install now’.
5. Click ‘Activate plugin’, and you’re ready to go.

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from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/new-plugin-add-on-fact-check-for-yoast-seo-1-4/