Indexing is an important part of what a search engine does. Without indexing, all the pages Googlebot crawls don’t have a place to live — and the ranking systems don’t have the input they need to do their work. If Google can’t index your site it can’t appear in the search results. The basics of…
What is crawlability?
Ranking in search engines requires a website with flawless technical SEO and great, relevant content. Luckily, the Yoast SEO plugin takes care of (almost) everything on your WordPress site. Still, if you really want to get the most out of your website and keep outranking the competition, some basic knowledge of technical SEO is a must….
SEO for a new website: the very first things to do
How does a new website start ranking? Does it just magically appear in Google after you’ve launched it? What things do you have to do to start ranking in Google and get traffic from the search engines? Here, I explain the first steps you’ll need to take right after the launch of your new website….
Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way
We’ve said it way back when, but we’ll repeat it: it keeps amazing us that there are still people using just a robots.txt files to prevent indexing of their site in Google or Bing. As a result, their site shows up in the search engines anyway. Do you know why it keeps amazing us? Because…
The ultimate guide to robots.txt
The robots.txt file is one of the main ways of telling a search engine where it can and can’t go on your website. All major search engines support the basic functionality it offers, but some of them respond to some extra rules which can be useful too. This guide covers all the ways to use…
hreflang: the ultimate guide
hreflang tags are a technical solution for sites that have similar content in multiple languages. The owner of a multilingual site wants search engines to send people to the content in their own language. Say a user is Dutch and the page that ranks is English, but there’s also a Dutch version. You would want…
The ultimate guide to the meta robots tag
If you use meta robots tags on your pages, you can give search engines instructions on how you’d like them to crawl or index parts of your website. This page lists an overview of all the different values you can have in the meta robots tag, what they do, and which search engines support each value….
What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know
An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language –…