A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website which leads Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be good for SEO, as they allow Google to quickly find your essential website pages, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect. This post explains what XML sitemaps are and how they help you rank better. What are XML sitemaps? You want Google to crawl every important page of your website, but sometimes pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, and helping it understand your website structure: Yoast.com’s XML sitemap Above is Yoast.com’s XML sitemap, created by the Yoast SEO plugin and later on we’ll explain how our plugin helps you create the best XML sitemaps. If you’re not using our plugin, your XML sitemap may look a little different but will work the same way. As you can see, … [Read more...] about What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one? • Yoast
Sitemap website example
Website Launch Checklist: 25 Things to Test Before Your Site Goes Live
Please note, there is an updated version of this article now available here: How to test a website before you launch: a 28 point checklist. Launching a website is a little like making homemade soup. You’ve got many ingredients coming together, and before you’re done adding them, you sample it to see that you got it just right. But this step – the testing – is often ignored before a site goes live. Testing a new website can seem overwhelming. Teams aren’t sure where to start. But you may have more help than you know. Every team member can assist in the pre-launch process. Most websites have writers, web developers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and network administrators coming together to create the site. These same people can help test it. Here’s how. Writers and editors have strong attention to detail when it comes to the written content on your site. And this attention to detail can also be used for other tasks as well. Here’s what … [Read more...] about Website Launch Checklist: 25 Things to Test Before Your Site Goes Live
How to test a website before you launch: a 28 point checklist
Three years ago, Mark Knowles wrote a thorough checklist for testing a website prior to its live launch. It was a very helpful guide, so we thought we’d update it for the current digital landscape. Here we present a guide on how to test a website, full of updated information and tips to make sure everything looks and works exactly as it should on launch day. Everyone has a role here, and that’s how the tasks have been divided – for Editors, Designers, Developers, SEOs and Network Administrators. Please note: many of the tips below are from Mark Knowles, but have been updated to reflect any changes. For the Editor and Writers… 1. Spelling, grammar, punctuation Check for proper spelling, typos, and grammar site-wide. Not just in article text and headlines, but also throughout the navigation, calls-to-action, buttons, forms etc. 2. Forms Fill out the forms on the site and go through the following questions: Can the flow be improved? Do you get stuck? Are the … [Read more...] about How to test a website before you launch: a 28 point checklist
Use “hreflang” for Multilingual Websites
The hreflang tag is used to tell Google and other search engines the language used on a specific page on your website. Search engines use the hreflang tag to ‘redirect’ the visitor to the page in the right language. Hreflang is also referred to as rel="alternate" hreflang="x". When I was discussing post subjects with our site review team, Annelieke pointed out that hreflang was mentioned on our website, but that we never did an article about it. Perhaps that is because for most sites, hreflang isn’t a ranking related issue. For the larger sites it could be, by the way. In this post, I’d like to explain a bit more about multilingual websites and how hreflang is important for these sites. What is Multilingual? In our online context, it basically means that content is available in more than one language. This can be cross border, for instance French or Chinese, but there is a bit more to that. It can also mean a language variation (so to speak) is available, like … [Read more...] about Use “hreflang” for Multilingual Websites
Internal Linking for SEO: Examples and Best Practices
Internal linking is a key SEO tactic for publishers. In this post I’ll look at what it is, why it’s important, and some key tips for effective linking. I recently wrote about the ways in which SEO and content marketing can work together, and I see internal linking as one of the most important ways. What is Internal Linking? Web practitioners from various disciplines may have different terms for this, but I think this is a term that’s well understood in the SEO ‘community’ and beyond. Broadly speaking, internal linking refers to any links from one page on a domain which lead to another page on that same domain. This can refer to the main site navigation, like the links you see above this article to our sections on SEO, PPC etc. It also refers to links within articles to related content, such as this link to an article on duplicate content. For the purpose of this post, I’m mainly going to confine myself to the latter – the editorial links within … [Read more...] about Internal Linking for SEO: Examples and Best Practices