The ultimate guide to robots.txt

WooCommerce 3.6, AMP plugin update, WPGraphQL and WordPress news

It’s time for another roundup, packed with updates. Today’s headlines: WooCommerce finally embracing the Gutenberg editor fully, AMP for WordPress delivering great improvements with their new update and an introduction to WPGraphQL. So much WordPress news to cover!

WooCommerce 3.6 Loves Gutenberg

WooCommerce saw an update that delivers much better integration with the new Block Editor. This update introduces blocks for Products by Category, Best Selling Products, Hand-picked Products, Newest Products, On Sale Products, Top-Rated Products, Products by Attribute and Featured Product. And I’ve got to say, having these blocks available is a huge improvement in this Gutenberg-powered era.

It’s also really good to see WooCommerce working hard on improving performance. That’s something we at Yoast are big fans of, and highly recommend all developers to have a strong focus on. You can learn more about WooCommerce 3.6 in their introductory post.

Big update for the AMP plugin

The AMP project aims to make the web faster. And that’s exactly what the new 1.1 release does. The WordPress AMP plugin saw some nice new features and bug fixes. I’m especially happy that the image rendering bug has been fixed.

WPGraphQL making strides!

If you haven’t yet heard of GraphQL, or its WordPress equivalent, WPGraphQL, I encourage you to check out this data query solution. It’s a very performant way to work with WordPress data.

With GraphQL, the client makes declarative queries, asking for the exact data needed, and in exactly what was asked for is given in response, nothing more. This allows the client to have control over their application and allows the GraphQL server to perform more efficiently by only fetching the resources requested.

WPGraphQL

They released a WPGraphQL integration plugin with ACF last week. This plugin makes working with custom data provided by ACF a very smooth experience, with a lot of potential.

WordPress and mental health

There’s a project growing inside the WordPress Community that deserves a bit more exposure: WP&UP. It aims to support and promote positive mental health within the WordPress community. From their website:

WP&UP recognizes that members of the WordPress community can potentially manifest mental health issues from a variety of pressures. The WP&UP Health Hubs are designed to provide holistic support for the individual.

WP&UP website

During WordCamp London, I met the team recently and learned more about their mission and goal. If mental health is (or should be) a focus of yours, do check out their website and see how they can help you.

WordPress 5.2 postponed for one week

Looks like the Release Candidate for WordPress 5.2 is going to be delayed for a week. And this invariably means the release itself is going to be postponed as well. So, what to do with all this extra time?! Well, you can start reading up on the Block Editor changes in WordPress 5.2 or a good summary of the new Fatal Error Recovery Mode in 5.2.

The post WooCommerce 3.6, AMP plugin update, WPGraphQL and WordPress news appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/woocommerce-3-6-amp-wpgraphql-wordpress-news/

How to use headings on your site

Why storytelling is good for SEO

Once upon a time, there was this woman – let’s call her Mia – and she wanted to write beautiful stories for her blog. Mia noticed she was not getting much traffic from Google, while other bloggers seemed to attract a lot of visitors. She wondered what she was doing wrong. One day, at a blogging conference Mia heard about a wonderful thing called SEO. She learned that she should use the words her audience was using, she learned she needed to think about the words she wanted to be found for. And she needed to use those exact words. It was a game changer for Mia. After applying these tips, Mia attracted much more traffic to her blog. Eventually, she even started making money with her blog. Mia blogged happily ever after.  

Stories are nice to read. Storytelling is a great tactic. But what does it have to do with SEO? Is it a good idea to use storytelling if your main goal is to rank for a specific term? In this blog post, the fourth in a series about storytelling, I am going to explain how storytelling can be an effective SEO tactic.

Storytelling and SEO may seem counterintuitive

An important part of SEO is focused on using the right words – the words you want to be found for- in your text. But if you use storytelling, if you use metaphors.  If you tell a story by making an example, chances are that you are not using your focus keyphrase then.

At the beginning of the post you are reading right now, I shared a little story about Mia. In that story, I am not using my focus keyphrase – the words I want to rank with, with this particular post. I want to rank with ‘storytelling SEO’. But in the entire first paragraph, the word ‘storytelling’ does not pop up. That, in itself, is not beneficial for your SEO. The Yoast SEO plugin will definitely suggest using the focus keyword in your first paragraph. So, you’ll have one bullet that’ll not turn green. That’s okay. It is totally okay to have a paragraph – or two – that does not contain the focus keyphrase.

So why is storytelling a good SEO tactic?

Storytelling is good for SEO because it will make your post nice to read. And, creating content that people like is exactly what Google wants. If you’re writing blog posts people enjoy reading, you’ll increase your chances to rank high in Google. In my previous post about storytelling, I’ve explained how you can use storytelling in a blog post.

If people like your content, you’ll also have a higher chance that people will remain on your website. Your time on page increases and your bounce rate will decrease. These factors will help tremendously with the ranking of your post.

Next to making your blog post more fun to read, storytelling is beneficial for SEO for another reason. If people like your post, they’ll be more likely to engage with it. They’ll leave a comment; they’ll share it on their social platforms. That’ll already increase traffic to your post. But these things will also increase the likelihood Google will rank a post. Google loves content that is written with people in mind. Google will notice that people like to read your text and that will result in higher rankings in the long run.

Conclusion

Use little stories as metaphors and examples. It’ll make your content so much nicer to read. Don’t worry about having an orange or red bullet. As long as your overall bullet in Yoast SEO is green, it’ll work out fine. Stories are beneficial for your SEO, more beneficial than a perfect keyword density or keyword distribution. Storytelling will allow you to write content that is so good that people will want to stay on your page. That’s very, very good for SEO!

Read more: Using storytelling op product pages »

The post Why storytelling is good for SEO appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/why-storytelling-is-good-for-seo/

A story about Schema, structured data and robots

Schema.org is hard; we’re making it easy

Yoast SEO 11.0: Structured data awesomeness

Tips to enhance your experience with the Block Editor

Today I’d like to highlight two plugins that supercharge the new Block Editor experience. They’re very different in nature, but I find them both equally impressive. There’s some news about the upcoming WordPress 5.2 release, and there might be mention of a bonus link. Come and find out.

Gutenberg on steroids

We’re four, five months into using the new Block Editor and by now, I’m sure, you’ve started to get the hang of it. I mean, I sure have. I love how I can easily play around with rich media in new, exciting ways with just a couple of clicks.

Having said that, there are times when I wish I had a bit more control over a certain block. So, I looked around and found two wonderful plugins that enhance my Gutenberg experience.

Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg

This is the most lightweight of the two, but a sweet one at that. It only does three things at the moment, but it does them perfectly:

• It adds code, subscript (sub), and superscript (sup) buttons to the formatting toolbar.
• It also adds inline text and a background color panel.
• And, it adds a “Remove formatting” button.

Like I said, only three things, but it gets a lot of joy out of these three little options. Find out more information here.

Advanced Gutenberg

The second plugin I found is a bit more complicated. It adds a plethora of options to existing Gutenberg blocks. I choose it for wanting a smarter way to display Gutenberg gallery images on one of my playground sites, a site about old German cars. Specifically, I wanted them to show in a lightbox pop-up when clicked on.

However, that’s only one small thing this plugin does. For example, it also allows you to configure:

• Default block configuration.
• Advanced Gutenberg icons block color.

And, you’re going to love this if options is your thing, it adds more than 20 different blocks to do all kinds of fancy things. Find out more at the WordPress.org plugin page.

WordPress 5.2, beta 3

WordPress 5.2 keeps being refined and improved. We’re currently already at beta 3. This beta release also marks the soft string freeze point of the 5.2 release schedule. If you speak additional languages besides English, now’s a great time to help to make sure WordPress 5.2 is properly translated in your language. WordPress 5.2 is slated for release on April 30, and we need all the testers we can get. Head over if you’d like to help out.

Bonus link

If you’ve ever needed to limit access your site to visitors who are logged in or accessing the site from a set of specified IP addresses, Restricted Site Access is the plugin you’re looking for. It’s a great solution for extranets, publicly hosted intranets or heck, you can even use it for your staging sites.

The post Tips to enhance your experience with the Block Editor appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/tips-to-enhance-your-experience-with-the-block-editor/

Rank with that cornerstone content!

Cornerstone articles are those posts that are most important to you. The ones you really want to rank with. The posts that make people come back to your site or buy your stuff. But how do you get those cornerstone articles to end up high in the search engines? How do you get the most out of your cornerstone articles?

To rank with these articles, you need to make sure they’re the best articles you can write. You also need a kickass internal linking structure. Luckily, Yoast is there to help! In this post, I’ll explain just what cornerstone content is and how to rank with these articles! Are you struggling with implementing cornerstone content? Check out how Yoast SEO can help you with your cornerstone strategy!

What not to do when trying to rank

Before we cover what to do, let’s first briefly discuss what not to do, and how ranking works. Without a doubt the most common question we are asked is: “how do I make my site rank for keyword X?”. What most people don’t realize, is that they’re asking the wrong question. You see, sites don’t rank: individual pages rank. If you want to rank for a particular keyword or keyphrase, you’ll need to determine which post or page you want to rank for that particular keyword.

Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not helpful; you should use a focus keyphrase only once. What also won’t work is writing 200 articles around variations of a keyphrase, without one central article linking them all together. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic – a “hub” page, if you will. That’s where cornerstone content comes in. But how do you make sure your cornerstone content articles start ranking in the search engines?

How to rank with your cornerstone content?

Create awesome content

Your cornerstone content will need to be 100% awesome in every way. You need to think about keyword research, headlines, awesome content and more. Not sure where to begin? Check out our detailed post on what type of article cornerstone content should be.

Read more: How the Yoast SEO cornerstone analysis helps you create your best articles »

Now go ahead and create that post or page on your site. Take your time, as this is going to be the content that’ll make you rank, but not just that, it’s going to be the content that ranks. Which means real people are going to read it as well, and you need to convert those people. So, think about search engines by all means, but think even more about the visitors who will end up reading that page – and give them something valuable.

Which keywords to target with cornerstone articles?

Your cornerstone articles should be optimized for your most ‘head’ or most competitive keywords. Of course, you should still be realistic when determining these head keywords. But, your internal linking structure will help your cornerstone pages rank (more on that below), which is why these articles should aim to rank for your most competitive keywords.

Positioning that new cornerstone content on your site

Now let’s talk about where to place that content on your site. Important content deserves a place within your core site structure, not a news item or blog post drifting around somewhere. It should be easily found in a few clicks.

This also means you should not create other pages within your site that target the exact same keyword! And you really don’t have to, as there are many ways to use keyword variations for these other pages and use these in your site structure.

Build a great internal linking structure

Like external links, internal links are very important for SEO. If you want your cornerstone content to rank well, your site structure needs to be impeccable. Google considers the articles that have most internal links pointing towards them the most important content on your website. That’s why you need to make sure your cornerstones get most internal links. These are the ones you want to rank with!

When you’re adding links to your cornerstones, use the keyword you’re targeting as the anchor text for that link, if possible. But most importantly, link from within the content. Don’t just add some site-wide sidebar/footer links. The reason for this is simple: links from within content are way more valuable than links from sidebars.

In addition to that, you need to make sure that you’re linking to your cornerstones from pages that actually are related. Contextual links are the ones that’ll help you rank. Adding hand-picked, relevant links that are useful for someone visiting your website, is the best way of achieving this. Automation will not give you quality results. That means that building a decent linking strategy is a lot of work, especially if your site is large.

Finding internal links in Google

You can use Google to find relevant internal links. The easiest way to figure out which pages Google thinks are relevant for your keyphrase is a ‘site:’ search in Google. So if I were to try and find the most important page for our local SEO plugin within yoast.com, I’d search for:

site:yoast.com local seo plugin

If you do this for a keyphrase on your site, you’ll probably find quite a few pages. Edit each of those pages and add a link to your new cornerstone content. As you can imagine, this can be a lot of work!

Boosting your internal linking structure with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO has two features to help you work on a great internal linking structure for your cornerstones. The text link counter and the internal linking tool (Premium). Both will make it a lot easier to work on that perfect site structure for your cornerstones.

The text link counter shows you how many incoming and outgoing internal links a post or page has, so you can keep an eye on the amount of internal links your cornerstone article gets.

The internal linking tool helps you to quickly pick related links to add to your posts and pages. It analyses all of your posts to figure out which articles are related. In the sidebar, you can easily pick articles that are relevant to link to. You can simply drag and drop the links in your article. The articles will be related and contextual because the plugin analyzed the content of all of your posts on prominent words. If you have indicated that your article is a cornerstone article, it will pop up highest, because they are the most important. Make sure to link to these, whenever they pop up.

Promote your cornerstone content

If well-written, your cornerstone content should be something to be proud of! Something that others willingly share and thereby also something that will attract links. Don’t be afraid to reach out to other people who have written about related topics: show them what you have created and that it might be worthwhile for their visitors to see. You might even want to offer to write a guest post for them on the topic, linking back to your article.

Conclusion: how to rank with cornerstones?

Your cornerstone articles deserve special attention. They need to be written carefully, to be the most complete and authoritative. They should also be easy to find on your site! Cornerstones need many contextual links pointing towards them to make Google see that they are the most important articles. That’ll make them rank in the search engines. That’ll get them the traffic they’re worthy of!

If you want to learn more about cornerstone content and setting up your site structure, we recommend…

• …finding out how to set up a cornerstone strategy with Yoast SEO
• …reading our ultimate guide on site structure
• …this article on internal linking: why and how
• …completing our site structure training

The post Rank with that cornerstone content! appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/rank-with-that-cornerstone-content/

Tagging posts properly for users and SEO

It can be hard to pick the right tags for a post. But they are important and that’s why we’ll explain how you can choose them. One of the most difficult things to do, as your site becomes bigger, is creating and maintaining a logical site structure. Tags and categories can help create that structure, allowing people to easily find posts that interest them.

When you use tags the wrong way, you can even make it harder for people to navigate your site. This isn’t just bad for users; using tags in the wrong way can be detrimental for your site’s SEO as well. Here, we’ll first dive into what tags do, followed by a good process for choosing them.

What happens when you add a tag?

When you add a tag to a post, that post is added to that tag’s archive. For instance, we have a tag page for keyword research. When we add a “keyword research” tag to this post, it’s added to that archive. That is, of course, very useful: when people click on the keyword research tag, they’ll find a complete overview of all posts on that topic. Also, Google will understand all the posts in this archive belong together.

When you add a tag that hasn’t been used before to a post, WordPress automatically creates a tag archive. If you tag very liberally, adding 10-20 tags to each post, each of them unique to each post, you’re creating dozens of archive pages.

If each of those archive pages only has 1 or 2 posts on them, they’re not very useful. First of all, they won’t help users find other related posts. And, secondly, they won’t help Google understand what your site’s about. In the past, we even saw plenty of sites that had an overload of tag pages get hit by Google’s Panda update.

From this we can conclude:

1. You shouldn’t add too many tags to a post.
2. You shouldn’t use tags that don’t relate the current post to any other post on your site.

But what should you do?

How to choose your tags

When you’re planning your blog posts, it’s likely you’ll have some over-arching themes. Those themes are probably your best tags. On yoast.com, for instance, we often write about SEO copywriting and Site structure, but also about WordPress, Schema.org or Google Analytics. These are just some examples of the tags we commonly use for our posts.

When choosing tags you should ask yourself:

• Which other posts does this post relate to?
• Which tag applies best to this group of posts? What’s the common denominator?
• Is that the best keyword choice for this topic?

You shouldn’t make up tags; they should be existing words or phrases. Words or phrases people search for. That’s why we’d advise performing keyword research first. In our Ultimate guide to keyword research, you can read how to go about that, step by step.

Optimize your tag page

You can even optimize your tag pages to try to make them rank well too. Our Yoast SEO plugin will help you with this. The content analysis will not only check the content of single blog posts or pages, but it ‘ll also run a check on your tag page. As a result, you’ll get detailed instructions on how to improve the content on it.

How to further optimize tag and category pages we explain in this extensive article on category SEO, so please check that out too. What you should remember is that when you’re doing your keyword research, deciding that something is going to be a tag is a valid choice!

Find related content with tags

There’s another advantage of tagging posts properly. When you’ve written a post and you’re wondering which other posts to link to, you can quickly browse through the tag that new post belongs to. This will help you find posts that you can link to from within your current post, to help visitors find related content even more easily. (If you think that’s too much work, you might want to consider using our Internal linking tool for that)

Go through them regularly

When you’ve chosen the right tags and tagged your posts nicely, you’re done for a while, but not forever! Your site structure, just as everything else on your site, requires regular maintenance. You might think of new topics to write about or the focus of your business might shift. So make sure to go through your tags regularly, remove redundant ones and check if you’ve added any new topics you’re writing about.

Choose your tags carefully

When you write your blog post, think about your tags thoroughly. Don’t make it a 2-second afterthought. They’re important for visitors and Google! The good thing about thinking about your tags is that it also immediately helps you find other posts to link to. Good luck with your tagging!

Read more: How to clean up your site structure »

The post Tagging posts properly for users and SEO appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/tagging-posts-properly-for-users-and-seo/

Create your first report in Google Data Studio

Yoast subscriptions: keep your SEO on track

Yoast has been offering subscriptions to our plugins and courses since November of 2018. Lots of happy customers have already purchased a subscription plan! But why would you need a subscription? Isn’t it enough to thoroughly invest in SEO once? What’s the use of an ongoing subscription? I am so glad you asked ;-).

SEO needs commitment

To keep ranking in the search engines, you’ll have to make an ongoing effort. That’s the only way to stay ahead in the search game. So, you’ll have to make sure that your website is awesome. You need to create new, amazing, engaging content. You must structure your website in a way that Google understands it. On top of that, you’ll have to make sure that your site’s technical SEO is flawless and your site’s speed is top notch.

To really get your SEO on track, you need to make it part of your process. It just needs to be something you think about and focus your efforts on very regularly.

SEO courses that’ll keep you up to date

Yoast Academy offers you a wide range of SEO courses for both beginners and people with more experience. We have online training courses that teach you how to write SEO-friendly content and courses that help you set up a decent site structure, as well as courses that teach you everything about technical SEO. Of course, we also have a great course on our own Yoast SEO plugin. These courses are updated regularly.

To stay ahead in SEO, we do a lot of research at Yoast. We talk to people from Google and Bing directly and discuss matters with other SEO experts and companies. All the knowledge we gather is translated into the features of our plugin and into the lessons in our courses.

Subscribe to SEO commitment!

A Yoast subscription will keep you focused on your SEO. But different people have different needs. That’s why we’re offering three subscription plans:

1. Yoast plugin subscription

This plan gives you access to all our premium plugins. The Yoast plugin subscription is the complete toolbox for your site. It saves you a lot of time and effort, and helps you to boost your rankings!

2. Yoast training subscription

Get the Yoast training subscription and you’ll get access to every Yoast Academy training course, including every new course we’ll release. This is a great way to learn all about SEO, to keep ahead of your competition.

3. Yoast plugin + training subscription

The best of both worlds. This plan gives you access to all our premium plugins and every Yoast Academy training course. With this subscription plan, you’ll learn how to optimize every SEO aspect of your site, and you’ll be fully equipped to improve your site’s SEO.

And pay for the time you need!

You can choose to get an annual (best value!) or a monthly subscription. We want to offer people products that are tailored to their needs. That’s why you can choose to pay a small fee per month, rather than paying up front for the whole year.

However, if you already know that you want to:

• stay on top of your SEO game all day every day,
• have access to all new courses, and want to
• save a lot of money in the process,

simply pick our annual subscription. Getting one of our annual subscription plans, will save you over 60%!

Yes, I want a Yoast subscription! ▸

Bonus: exclusive premium insights!

On top of all this, there’s something extra in it for you: premium content, exclusively available for subscription members. If you decide to get the Yoast training subscription or the Yoast plugin + training subscription, there’ll be extra premium content available for you in Yoast Academy.

This premium content consists of Q&A sessions, in which our experts answer your SEO questions. Moreover, you’ll get access to exclusive live talks and discussions on the latest SEO developments, with SEO experts like Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson. You don’t want to miss out on this!

Get a Yoast subscription!

Do you want to step up your SEO game? Whether you want to improve your SEO knowledge or to optimize your site with useful SEO tools, a Yoast subscription is what you need. And remember, it’s the only way to get access to exclusive premium content, such as Q&A sessions and live talks! So, don’t wait any longer, go get your Yoast subscription!

Check out the Yoast subscriptions Now ▸

The post Yoast subscriptions: keep your SEO on track appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/yoast-subscriptions/

PHP requirement for WordPress, WooCommerce dashboard and Gutenberg 5.4

Today’s roundup is all about various upcoming updates across the WordPress ecosphere. From WordPress itself to Gutenberg, PHP, and WooCommerce. Let’s get started!

WordPress wants you to update your PHP

If you’ve been following my roundups, you may recall that WordPress is finally bumping its minimum PHP requirement in the upcoming WordPress 5.2 release. I usually don’t like to repeat myself, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Partly, because there now is a post on WordPress.org by Aaron Jorbin. In it he says the following:

If your site is running on an unsupported version of PHP, the WordPress updater will not offer WordPress 5.2 to your site. If you attempt to update WordPress manually, that update will fail. To continue using the latest features of WordPress you must update to a newer version of PHP.

WordPress.org

More information about what this means for you, why you should want to upgrade anyway, and how to prepare can be found in the rest of the post. I highly encourage you to read it.

A new WooCommerce Dashboard is in the making

WooCommerce, the most popular e-commerce solution for WordPress, has shared some interesting news about a new feature. They’re going to completely overhaul the WooCommerce dashboard.

It will give store owners a quick overview of how their store is performing and the ability to customize the dashboard to their needs. Store owners can view charted data directly from the Dashboard via 14 different data points, and select any chart to load an associated report for deeper analysis.

With those 14 data points, store owners can track performance with statistics, analytics, and other reports

WooCommerce is bundling this new dashboard in a feature plugin which you can download for testing. Read all about it in their announcement post.

Gutenberg 5.4

Last but not least, let’s look at the progress in Gutenberg. From the Make WordPress Core blog:

Foundational work and initial UI explorations to implement the block-based widgets screen are on-going. In the meantime, the contributors worked on a number of bug fixes and improvements. All the bug-fixes will be included in the next beta of WordPress 5.2.

Meaning, even though the features added up until Gutenberg 5.3 will be added to WordPress 5.2, bug-fixes found to those features are still being included to the betas.

If you’d like to read more about how Gutenberg 5.4 now supports vertical alignment for the columns block – and more – you can do so here.

The post PHP requirement for WordPress, WooCommerce dashboard and Gutenberg 5.4 appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/wordpress-php-requirement-woocommerce-dashboard-gutenberg-5-4/

Cornerstone analysis to help you create your best articles

How to optimize your restaurant website

What is keyword stemming?

Google can read and analyze texts very well. Google understands that ‘walk’, ‘walking’, ‘walked’, ‘walks’ all boils down to the same thing. Also, Google knows that ‘baby’ is basically the same thing as babies. Optimizing your text for an exact match keyword isn’t a very smart thing to do. That’s why we introduced word form recognition in Yoast SEO Premium. You can now optimize your post and we’ll analyze the different word forms like walk, walks and walking. For longer tail keywords, we also recognize the words if you decide to use them in a different word order.

So, at Yoast, we talk about word forms, sometimes also about morphology recognition. At the same time, I hear the linguists at Yoast talking about keyword stemming too. And I noticed some SEOs talked about it as well. But what is keyword stemming? How does stemming relate to morphology recognition? And what does it have to do with SEO? I’ll explain all about it in this post.

What is stemming?

Stemming or keyword stemming refers to Google’s ability to understand different word forms of a specific search query. It is called stemming because it comes from the word stem, base or root form. If you use the word ‘buy’ in a sentence, a stemming algorithm would recognize the words ‘buys’, ‘buying’ and ‘bought’ as variations of the word ‘buy’ as well. Some SEOs also differ between stemming and lemmatization.

Google has used stemming in its algorithms for a long time now. The first blog posts about it from SEO experts like Rand Fishkin and Bill Slawski go as far back as 10 years ago. For languages other than English, Google began recognizing word forms much later. In recent years, Google’s algorithm became even more advanced, making exact match keyword optimization more and more outdated.

If you want to optimize your text for the term ballet shoes, for example, you should be able to use the term ballet shoe as well. Google understands that ballet shoes and ballet shoe are basically the same thing. Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin recognizes both word forms as well (at least in English and, since Yoast SEO 10.1, in German).

Stemming and word forms

If people are talking about keyword stemming or a stemming algorithm, they mean that the algorithm is able to recognize different word forms of a certain keyword. That’s exactly what the word forms functionality in Yoast SEO does. We do not automatically detect synonyms, but we do allow you to enter synonyms and we’ll take them into account in our SEO analysis.

Maybe we should have called our word forms functionality stemming. But it’s a difficult word to explain to people. So, that’s why we’ll stick with word forms.

Stemming and SEO

Google has become very smart. It understands texts. It understands context. In order to stand a chance in the search engines, you need to write awesome texts that show your authority on a certain subject. Content stuffed with keywords does not rank anymore. Google hates that, users hate that.

You need to use synonyms and related keywords in your content to make it pleasant to read and to make it rank! You need to use different word forms in order to write a post that is nice to read. Thanks to stemming, we can tell that they belong together. Read more about it in our post about our word form analysis.

Conclusion

The SEO industry has been talking about stemming and lemmatization for over a decade. Our linguists talk about it too. For good reason, because stemming allows them to recognize different word forms. This isn’t “easy”. At Yoast, we have an entire team of linguists working on our SEO and readability analyses. We’re now able to recognize different word forms properly for both English and German. We’re already working on new languages, I know Dutch is high on our list — probably because it’s our native language. Do let me know: which language should we tackle next?

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

The post What is keyword stemming? appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/what-is-keyword-stemming/

Yoast SEO 10.1: Wortformen auf Deutsch

Plugin tips for A/B testing, profiling and more!

Why focus on long tail keywords?

What is structured data?