Listly by Jackson Middleton
The WordPress.org forums for our WordPress SEO plugin are rather busy. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to keep up with all the questions there as we have millions of users, which leads to a few hundred questions each month. So we need your help! Loads of the questions there are rather simple, others are...
Our WordPress SEO plugin handles optimization of your WordPress site for search engines and we dare say it does a very good job of it. Most of that is technical optimization, like our XML sitemap functionality and aids in content optimization, like your page analysis function. But there's more to SEO than that.
Last night I pushed out an update to our WordPress SEO plugin, version 1.4.8. It included a ton of changes including support for the new author stuff Facebook announced yesterday. We had been testing all the other changes in that release for a while already and all seemed fine, so I was baffled when I...
I've been working on integrating our SEO plugins more deeply with Genesis the last few weeks and something dawned on me. Ever since I wrote my post on Genesis 2.0, I've been thinking: Genesis started a small revolution, but we should open that up. More theme developers should start doing a Schema.org API and if...
Since I began working at Yoast, I've been busy with a lot of things, but my personal favorite definitely is this one: conversion. Maybe this is because of my background in behavioural science. Or maybe I just prefer bigger numbers to smaller ones. In any case, the fact remains: I'm hooked.
About a week ago, Olivier Blanchard, one of the few people who pride themselves on working in social media whose posts I actually enjoy reading, wrote a post on his blog. Now you might think that's not very news worthy, but it was his first post since February 25th.
About a week ago, we "migrated" Yoast.com to Genesis 2.0, in the process we switched to their new HTML5 / Schema.org code and we slightly updated our design, making the header shorter and making improvements to our responsive design. This was a bit of work, but not even half as much as that sounds like...
We regularly review sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. I've always said and will continue to say that affiliate links should be redirected through a redirect script, but when we tried to help a client by linking to a proper explanation and example script, we couldn't find one.
Our WordPress SEO plugin has been getting more and more downloads, bringing it to the top of the most downloaded plugin chart on WordPress.org fairly regularly. With that comes more interest from other developers as well, which is something we absolutely love, but is kind of impossible to manage properly on WordPress.org.
When we started doing premium WordPress plugins, we also added a support forum to yoast.com. Many people liked this but I was, to be honest, skeptic. My experience with the WordPress.org forums are ... Poor, at best. I just don't think forums work very well, in large part because there is an ever continuing tendency...
I find myself becoming more and more defensive of WordPress SEO plugins, my own in particular. When people make jokes about them I tend to get angry, which is perhaps a stupid reaction, but it made me think: why would people make jokes about them, are they that stupid?
Lately we've been inundated, literally, with support requests for WordPress SEO and its premium add-ons, all asking one "simple" thing: why isn't Google picking up my page title? People who changed their page title and see that the search results still show their old title are bound to think Google didn't "get" the new title yet and of course they blame their SEO plugin (sigh).
Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to Synthesis, the managed WordPress hosting platform operated by Copyblogger Media. Previously this site had been hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them....
Warning: this isn't the usual SEO / WordPress related post, but more of a "personal" post about how I've gone about building and changing my / our business. When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there.
Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn't access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn't handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the last bit might be interesting for more advanced users.
We've been hard at work here at Yoast.com, together with our good friend Arjan Snaterse, to complete the delivery of our next baby: the Local SEO plugin, which is, just like our Video SEO plugin, an extension to the WordPress SEO plugin. The Local SEO makes creating geo sitemaps and KML files a breeze, while...
For all sorts of reasons, some people have a problem with updating WordPress installs properly. I will state now that for both our free and premium plugins we do not support anything but the latest and the prior to last version. At the time of writing that's WordPress 3.5 and WordPress 3.4.
This question pops up time and again: why can I only add one focus keyword to your SEO plugin? People seem to think they have to set several keywords for each post. This post explores the reasoning behind that, very deliberate, decision.
Over the last 3 years, we've sold & delivered 500 website reviews, selling our 500th today. I'm incredibly proud of this and wanted to share some of our learnings in this post, as well as announce some changes. Some stats on our website reviews I started doing these website reviews in 2010, finishing 42 of...
As of last night, a license for our Video SEO plugin has become $20 cheaper for what's probably about 90% of our customers. While doing an analysis over the holidays of what we'd sold and how much time we spent supporting people, we found that people using the plugin on multiple sites were bound to ask...
Today my buddy Sander pointed out that he suddenly had pages showing as noindex,nofollow when he ran a spider across a site. A bit more researching learned us that WordPress automatically adds a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag to each URL that has ?replytocom in it.
This morning, an article by Paul Boag was published on Smashing Magazine that got a few SEOs, including myself, all riled up. As Bill Slawski pointed out in the comments, Paul has written articles on SEO before. Paul, whom I respect tremendously for his web development work, obviously doesn't "get" SEO and has evidently had...
One of the benefits of making money on paid plugins is that you can more easily spend money for other people to look at and even better, review your plugins. Today is the first result of what might become a somewhat longer tradition: WordPress SEO is now a Sucuri Safe Plugin.
The Jetpack plugin for WordPress has quite a few nice bits and pieces. There's one issue: the developers at Automattic seem to think they're alone in the world. In their last release, they enabled OpenGraph tags by default with no setting to disable it.
As we're now running a plugin shop here on yoast.com, selling our Video SEO plugin, Tag optimizer and soon more, we also have a checkout page. I wanted that checkout page to run on https, for obvious reasons: people fill out their email and, depending on their payment method, their credit card details there.