It was never actually known as such, of course, but an experiment from back then remains instructive and shapes our SEO strategies today.

A blog post I wrote titled Improving Your Rankings with Google Search Console ensured that the Food Fanatic team would never see the word “parboil” the same way again.

If you don’t have that 2017 post bookmarked, I forgive you, but check it out via the link above to see why we chose parboiling and ended up partially boiling a ton of different starches and vegetables.

The summary for those just skimming this: We used Google Search Console (GSC) to find posts we were getting search traction on, yet were still ranked outside the top three.

We architected a related content strategy around that term, and developed supporting content that linked back to our cornerstone content – how to parboil.

Our parboiling ranking slowly but surely improved.

SEO is a Garden, Registered Trademark

If you’ve heard me give a SEO talk before, you’ve likely heard a line that I’ve been using ever since I stole it from Joshua Daniel Rodrigues Unseth around 2014:

SEO is like a garden. Keep maintaining it and it will grow beautifully. Let the weeds take over and your parboil rankings will drop before you know it.

If you haven’t guessed, we can speak from experience because Food Fanatic indeed let the weeds take over.

But that’s not the end of the story. By returning to that garden and refreshing our content with a little love, our parboiling ranking has returned and then some.

Check out this GSC snapshot to see:

Now that I have your attention, let’s get into the weeds … sort of literally!

You’re about to draw upon so many lessons you’ve learned from my SEO Like a CEO series through the years. Beginning with:

Tip 1: Link to Cornerstone Content From Your Homepage

If you’ve read my site structure post, you likely remember this tip.

Make sure your cornerstone content is linked from your homepage, via a link in your navigation (top is best, sidebar is second best, footer is last best).

If you run a static homepage, you can accomplish this via a Popular Posts section, a Best Of section, or whatever else you can come up with.

Here’s the key, though: You’ll want to make sure that the cornerstone content, e.g. “How to Parboil,” is one “hop” from the homepage.

In other words, that there’s always a link from the homepage to this content.

This is explicitly stated advice from Google, if you don’t want to take my word for it. Whether you trust me, Google, or both, I can’t stress how crucial this is.

Sadly, we didn’t have this when the crabgrass and fescue invaded our parboil garden (first time that sentence has ever been written) and our content from 2017 got buried.

File that under lessons learned, but also problems solved: We’ve since added a quick, top-level navigation of Popular and added a link to “How to Parboil,” as well as other top posts.

Tip 2: Update Cornerstone Content

We’ve said it before, but Google and users love fresh content.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re searching for. Are you more likely to open a post that was last updated eight years ago or eight days ago?

Our original parboiling post is in fact from 2013, but that doesn’t mean it’s outdated. We’re still updating it so that readers (and Google) see a current version.

We added fresh photos (it helps that our new Food Fanatic editor is a great photographer) and freshened up the content enough that Google would consider it updated.

We then changed the updated / modified date – NOT the publishing date.

(If you think I’m anti-deleting content, you should see how I feel about re-publishing. Don’t do it! Update the old. Update it some more. Resist the urge to re-publish!)

Armed with this updated content and a shiny new modified stamp, it wasn’t long before we saw the fruits of our labor with fresh search results:

Tip 3: Add More Related Content

Just like we dug in and updated our original blog post with some new material to freshen it up, we went looking for some more related content as well. 

If you pay for a keyword search tool, that’s a great place to head to find related parboiling content, but if you know our original post, you know where we went: Google itself.

Google’s prominent and free “People Also Ask” and “Related Content” sections are often the best and easiest source of ideas, and this was no exception.

We found some great additional parboiling terms right there:

We were able to add five new parboiling posts, and just like our original strategy, each of these posts linked back to our cornerstone content.

Tip 4: Find Related Keywords

Here’s a great bonus tip. In our SEO Like a CEO series, you’ll often hear me say you should think of each post as targeting a single-focus keyphrase.

While that’s 100% true, we also encourage long-form content (think 500+ words, or even this 1,227-word thesis you’re reading) whenever possible.

With long-form content, you expand the playing field, giving yourself opportunities to rank for additional long tail keywords, not only your targeted key phrase.

For this exercise, we hit up Google Search Console’s performance tab to see what other terms our cornerstone and supporting content are ranking on.

You can do this by running a query filter containing parboil, or a page filter with any URLs containing parboil (or even just your cornerstone content).

Through this method, we learned about all kinds of queries we were ranking on – and which we could easily add additional content for.

How to parboil. How long to parboil, etc.

We then went back and updated our content to include those as sections — each with a big H2 heading and the phrase and content below it.

Tip 5: Update Old Supporting Content

If you’re still with us, you understand where we’re going with this. Just as we updated our cornerstone content, we refreshed our supporting content accordingly.

Any content that was close to ranking in the top three spots (how to parboil rice, in this case) got a link from the other supporting content.

We also repeated Tip 4 for the supporting content; “How long to parboil rice” is just as relevant here.

Guess What? It Works!

Sure enough, all of our new supporting content began to rank as well. Overall, we’re up 250% in parboil traffic after what amounted to 10 hours of content creation.

Ten hours of parboiling sounds like a lot, but consider this: Semrush shows that there are over 100K searches for parboiling and related queries every month.

Ranking in the top three for these queries would likely be enough for a site to meet Mediavine requirements by running parboil-related content alone.

Remember, you don’t need a single cornerstone – no matter how much you love parboiling every conceivable food. You can follow this strategy with several niches.

Follow these tips and watch your traffic simmer to a (par)boil. Sorry.

The post SEO is a Garden a.k.a. The Parboil Strikes Back appeared first on Mediavine.

Should you delete content that’s old and/or not doing a lot for you?

Looking for a quick answer? Sorry. We’re going to make you power through a 1,555-word novel because this isn’t thin content we’ll be deleting anytime soon — you’ll get the cleverness of that joke in a second!

In truth, there are differing views on whether you should delete old content and why. But before we reach our verdict, there are some key concepts to understand.

SEO theorists who advocate for you to delete content lean heavily upon the following terms.

Thin Content

Thin content is like a thin argument — a page that provides little unique value to the reader.

Commonly, these are pages such as “hallway” or “doorway” pages, existing primarily to provide links to pages with content, while the page itself doesn’t have unique content. For example, remember when you were going to spend the entire summer creating delicious tomato recipes, so you created a tag and a category page for this content in advance? But then your tomato crop was hardly bumper and you ended up not writing a single post, so that tag and category page have no content?

We could write a whole blog post on this (it wouldn’t be thin, either!) but in short, if a page doesn’t provide direct SEO value to Google, why show it to Google? It’s not going to rank.

But is there any harm in thin content?

Since Google indexes everything on a per-page basis (see our PageRank post), there’s no overall harm to your site from having thin content.

The bigger concern is that it can actually impact the second concern:

“Crawl Budget”

The internet is very large, and even Google has finite resources when crawling every site.

This leads to the concept of crawl budget, or how much time Googlebot will spend browsing each of the pages on your site per day, week or month.

Basically, Googlebot has limited time for you and everyone else. Exactly how limited? That will vary by site and based on additional factors:

• Site Speed: The slower your site, the longer it takes to crawl. (Cough, you need to pass Core Web Vitals).
• PageRank: The more you have, the higher your authority and the more time Google can justify giving you resources compared to smaller sites. (The New York Times likely has a greater crawl budget than you do, regardless of how slow it may be.)
• Updating: A properly configured sitemap will tell Google how often your site is updated, but either way, Google will figure it out. If you only post once a month, and your older content is rarely updated, Google will crawl with less frequency. If you update regularly, Google will be there constantly. 

This is where thin content comes in. If Google finds a lot of it, you have two potentially problematic scenarios on your hands:

1. Squandering your limited crawl budget on thin pages when Google could be looking at more important ones, or worse;
2. Google lowering your crawl budget altogether if it encounters predominantly thin content.

So Should You Delete Content, or What?

After reading all that, you’re probably thinking about all the thin content you need to delete. Which is why our answer to the above questions may surprise you:

No! Don’t do it!

Even Google itself, in the article linked to above, says publishers shouldn’t worry about this. As long as you’re indexing fresh content (e.g. if your latest post is indexed that same day, or that same week if you post infrequently), then you have no issues with crawlability and can likely move on.

Secondly, it’s also important to note that old content isn’t necessarily thin.

If you wrote a post a decade ago, before you knew about SEO, or before you wrote longer/more relevant posts for whatever reason, the older stuff may be shorter, but it likely isn’t thin.

Please remember, thin content doesn’t refer to the page’s length but its value; thin content means that it offers nothing unique to the reader.

Think about the summer of no tomatoes example from above, with the tag page you made for your new category which now houses a link to one whole post with no unique content ever created for it.

That’s thin.

So should you delete that tag/page? Well, 698 words later, allow me to introduce you to a strategy that I’ve used on Mediavine’s own sites with success.

Don’t Delete. Instead, Just Don’t Link.

Remember, Google’s crawler works like a spider, following the path of the web. It can only get from one page to the next via internal links.

If you simply stop linking to a page, Google stops crawling and indexing it.

As the old adage goes, if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a webpage isn’t linked to and can’t be crawled, does it still exist? (Yes, but also no.)

Going back to our example earlier, let’s say you have a bunch of tag pages that you never wrote unique content for. You could simply update your theme to stop linking to those tags.

The tag pages you do use? Switch them to a different taxonomy, such as categories.

If that doesn’t work for your overall strategy, simply remove the offending/thin tag from any posts and suddenly nothing will link to it.

Why is This Better Than Deleting?

Generally, because it’s safer. Again, paraphrasing the old saying: If a webpage has no links to it, does it exist?

In Google’s eyes, no. Not linking to a post has the exact same effect as deleting it.

So why is it better? Wouldn’t deleting said pages “speed up” your site by taking up fewer server resources? And just be faster than thinking all of this through?

As far as any modern database or hosting company is concerned, no. One page on a site will take up very little space with zero impact on your site speed.

There’s no risk involved in the act of not linking to a post or page. Removing links is safe. The dangers of deleting content, on the other hand, do exist.

What if you directly linked to that tag in another post, or unbeknownst to you, someone else on the internet linked to the tag page via a backlink?

If you delete a post without cleaning up the links back to it, you’re potentially wasting PageRank by sending it into the Vast Black Hole of Deletion.

That’s not a real term, although we should probably trademark it. You get the idea — sending PageRank into the void, never to be seen again.

Worse yet, what if the page or post you’re about to delete actually brings in traffic you may not realize it gets?

Our celebrity gossip website, The Hollywood Gossip, regularly sees traffic on posts from 5-10 years ago. A page can be stagnant for years, then all of a sudden take off once a Z-lister finds their way back into the news.

If we deleted the content, we’d lose that potential. Instead, we stopped linking to THG’s oldest content archives, keeping them alive while preserving our link equity and crawl budget.

Google still knows the old stuff is there; THG’s got the traffic on reality television stars from 2011 to prove it. This way, you get the benefits of deletion without any loss of traffic and potential PageRank.

What if You Redirect the Old Content?

“My SEO guy told me to redirect that deleted content to my homepage or some other content!”

No offense to that SEO guy, but fire that SEO guy.

Kidding. Mostly. Not really.

Redirecting does not fully transfer link equity, even in the best case scenario. Google’s own Matt Cutts has said some PageRank will dissipate or be diluted when doing this.

But more importantly, link equity only transfers through a redirect in the case of a change in URL, or a canonicalization.

For example, let’s say you changed your URL to remove the dates, and therefore, were simply telling Google that you moved a post from one URL to another.

Or let’s say you made your site https, or secure, (please tell me you have, it’s 2021, people), and set up a redirect from the old http:// structure to the new https://.

In those scenarios, you are transferring most of the PageRank, having properly used the redirect to indicate to Google that you moved the content.

If you’re deleting a post and then redirecting the content to anything but where you moved that post’s content, you’re losing the PageRank.

No 301 to the homepage, or even to a related post that isn’t a true replacement, will pass on the PageRank. The robots are too smart.

(Disclaimer: If you’re replacing the content you deleted, then a redirect will work.)

By and large, just remove links to any thin content you believe to be a problem. Don’t delete it.

Is it Ever Safe to Delete Content?

Of course. If you know there are no links to a post, internally and externally, and it hasn’t ranked on anything in over a year, and thus won’t cause a loss of links or traffic, you can axe it.

But again, what’s the point?

Unless you have the tools and knowledge to understand when it’s safe to delete, it’s generally just better to nix the links to thin content and call it a day.

Or, in the unlikely event that Kim Kardashian’s lawyer wants some salacious rumor taken down, you should probably go ahead and delete that, too.

Bottom line, you’re better off spending the resource of your limited time creating fresh content about Kim’s latest arm candy rather than worrying about deleting old posts about former flames.

The post Should You Delete Content or Just Stop Linking? An SEO Dilemma appeared first on Mediavine.

With that in mind, we’ve put together the ultimate guide on how to link — while following our own advice and including a plethora of links to our previous posts about linking to boot! So meta.

What Are Links?

Links, or hyperlinks, are typically the blue, underlined words on a page (although themes can and typically do adjust the color with CSS) or anything that appears between <a> and </a> tags in the HTML.

They’re how users navigate from page to page, making them part of the literal foundation of the World Wide Web.

Why Are Links So Important?

One word: PageRank.

There’s a reason we all Google things today and don’t AltaVista them. The original PageRank algorithm that differentiated the Google search engine from its competitors still reigns supreme today.

Google realized that on-page signals like keywords alone won’t tell you everything about a page and needed to follow the hyperlinks as well.

While the PageRank algorithm has become a smaller ranking signal over time as Google continues to develop more intelligent link analysis, at its core the message is the same:

Google analyzes websites on a per page level, not just the domain. A link to a page is a vote for that page, and yes, you can vote for yourself.

But first, let’s look at how to link.

Anchor Text

While the pages that link to you and what you link to will always be most impactful on rankings, HOW you link is also a key factor.

You should always link with plain text words whenever possible instead of linking on images. And not just on any text but on the right text.

Be sure the anchor text inside the opening and closing tags are the keywords or keyphrase describing the page you’re linking to.

For example, if you link to this guide — and please do if you find it useful! — we’d love for you to link to it on anchor text such as “SEO linking guide” rather than something like “click here.”

Internal Links

As we mentioned above, every link from your website to another is like a vote for that page to rank. Everyone who links to you is voting for you.

But what’s really cool? Like any democracy, you can vote for yourself. Even better than democracy (well, for SEO purposes at least)? You can vote for yourself more than once — and you should.

As they say, vote early and vote often.

To that end, internal links (links within your own website) are incredibly important. As a general guide, you should load up your pages and posts with as many internal links as you can organically.

If you can get every paragraph or two to feature a link to yourself, that’s actually a good thing — as long as your anchor text naturally fits within that sentence and the anchor text you’re linking on describes the page you’re linking to. That’s what we mean by organically.

As you get good at this and start thinking about SEO as you write, you’ll subconsciously find yourself creating more link opportunities.

What should you link to? Well, glad you asked! Segue alert…

Site Structure

As great as just linking to whatever organically fits into a sentence is, you should also be thinking of an overall site structure strategy.

You should be able to divide the content on your website into categories, or silos. Let’s say you run a corporate blog that talks about all sorts of things — ad management, publishing advice, SEO and so much more.

Within the SEO section, which becomes one silo, you ideally link to other SEO content. And as you add more content to that SEO silo, you will break the main category down into subcategories.

You may end up with a subcategory for links and one for keywords. Within each of those subcategories, make sure you’re linking to other content in that subcategory, and back up to the main category itself.

Each category can also become its own cornerstone content, which offers you a great chance to rank for content on its own.

This strategy is the key to helping you not only organize your link equity, but also to create additional ranking opportunities.

Also important with regard to site structure is remembering the fact that your homepage is your most valuable page — it has the most links to it.

For this reason, your end goal should be to keep what you want to rank on no further than two links, or hops, away from the homepage.

Complex? You bet, but that’s why we have a blog post dedicated entirely to site structure to walk you through it.

Still with us? Great. Now that you’ve mastered internal linking, let’s head to the other side of the coin.

External Links

Voting for yourself is incredibly important, but what a lot of publishers don’t realize is that voting for others is a good thing as well!

It may seem counterintuitive to help other sites rank better, but you’ll also be helping yourself in the process. How?

Links aren’t just votes in a popularity contest, with winners and losers; they’re about recognizing who’s an authority on a subject.

Think of external links as sources you would cite in a book report. By linking to something, you’re saying that you did your research, sourced your information and can be trusted as a result.

Google encourages you to link externally, but choose the recipients of your outbound links wisely. You are judged based on these links, so before effectively endorsing someone, be sure they deserve it.

As for how often should you externally link? Ideally, you’ll include at least one per blog post. At the same time, include significantly more internal links than external links so you won’t lose PageRank.

As important as linking to others may be, guess what is still likely the most important factor in your ability to rank?

Backlinks

This one is a little easier said than done, but external links, or backlinks, pointed to you is the best way to build PageRank.

By definition, you’ll have less control over backlinks than internal links, so don’t stress as much about things like anchor text.

It’s ideal if others deep link, or link directly to the most relevant page, but if they link to your homepage — still good.

Take what you can get. A link is a link. Google recognizes that this is something you can’t control, so take it however you can, even if it’s through allowing other websites to syndicate your content.

Yes, this is a super controversial opinion in the blogging community, but hear us out: Sometimes those people scraping your site or “stealing” your content aren’t evil as you think, as long as they link to you.

For more on backlinks, take a look at this great post on the art of giving and receiving backlinks by Joshua Unseth on our blog.

As I always say, publishers don’t need to be computer experts or technical wizards to SEO Like A CEO. (This is actually the first time I’ve said that, but maybe it’ll stick, who knows.)

But seriously. These basic principles and best practices do become second nature with time. If you regularly write quality content and commit to optimizing it for SEO, you’ll be a pro before you know it.

If you’re looking for more SEO content, check out the Mediavine SEO Like A CEO series on our blog and on our YouTube channel.

The post SEO Guide: Linking appeared first on Mediavine.

As you may have heard in the news or from other publishers, Google’s AMP story format has recently been rebranded.

Welcome, Google Web Stories!

Stories are all the rage online these days, and with this new name change, they’ve at last become a “first class citizen” over at Google.

Web Stories will have their own dedicated carousel in Google Discover, which means a whole new opportunity for publishers to position their content for coveted, organic search traffic.

So how do you build Web Stories for Google and optimize them for SEO? Glad you asked, because we’ve got answers for you with the return of Mediavine’s SEO Like A CEO series below!

What Are Google Web Stories?

Google Web Stories are mini-AMP pages, or embeds that you create for posts on your site. They end up looking like the visual slideshows you’ve likely seen grow in popularity on Facebook and Instagram stories.

Think of Stories as a series of quick images or videos that a user can flip through and, well, tell the story you want to tell.

When it’s over, there’s a nice little Call to Action (CTA) that can encourage audiences to visit your site for additional information.

How Do You Make Web Stories?

If your website is powered by WordPress, you’re in luck.

Google has released an official Web Story plugin for WordPress, and that’s literally all you need to make Web Stories. It’s a great little drag-and-drop interface that includes templates to help get you started.

We’ll save the full web stories tutorial for a Amber’s blog post, and Google has some great documentation on the plugin to walk you through that part too.

Once you create the story, the plugin makes a new Web Story custom post for you to publish – though it won’t appear on your homepage feed.

So where does this post live, and how do you start getting traffic to it? That’s where this guide fits in.

How Do You Get Traffic To Web Stories?

Web Stories live on their own mini-pages within WordPress, and you don’t actually have to embed them or send them traffic yourself.

In fact, you don’t want to.

We’ll talk a little more about ads for Web Stories in a bit, but in short, they will not monetize as well as a regular blog post.

You want to use Web Stories to augment your blog post, and make readers want to read it as well as enjoy your web story. You do not want to divert traffic from the blog post to its Web Story.

For that reason, we do not recommend embedding Web Stories.

The goal is to bring in thousands of new visitors to Web Stories from Google Discover. Then, the CTA at the end of those stories will entice readers to visit your site, where your ads are optimized.

Sound good? We had a feeling it would. Follow this short guide to Web Story SEO to make it happen.

1. Create Stories For Top Posts First

This may seem counterintuitive, as you obviously want to rank on your latest content. However, this follows my usual mantra:

If Google thinks you’re an expert on a particular topic, they’re going to think you’re an expert in a Web Story about it.

Creating Web Stories for a top post is the same strategy as making a Recipe Card or a video for it. Think of it as an ad for your content.

The reason you’re doing this is twofold. One, you’re likely to rank well on that Web Story and two, this is a NEW spot for Google to show off your expertise.

It’s additional traffic in Google Discover you wouldn’t have received with your organic ranking alone. Even if you’re already ranked #1 for a particular article, it’s still a net gain of new traffic!

According to Casey Markee of Media Wyse, publishers are already seeing serious results from Web Stories.

Markee, who recommends bloggers create stories for their top 3-10 posts, says “the results have been fantastic … I had one blogger who generated 20,000 clicks from Google in ONE DAY from stories.”

To give you an idea of the potential here, another blogger he spoke of has generated 50,000+ sessions in December with Web Stories thus far!

2. Don’t Embed Web Stories in Posts

While Google recommends that publishers embed the Web Story in your posts, I don’t actually like this tactic, and I’ll explain why.

First, featuring the embed is going to slow down your page.

Additionally, if you create Stories the way we’re encouraging – and the way in which they make the most logical sense for both user experience and ad monetization – they’re previews of your content. Putting that preview within the content itself doesn’t serve any purpose.

Finally, and most importantly, you simply don’t have to. If you’re running the plugin, each story gets its own permalink on your site, and its own chance to rank. You do not need to embed them to rank, so don’t.

3. Link to Your Web Story

Google also recommends “deeply integrating Stories” in ways such as linking to them from your homepage or relevant category pages.

That’s definitely a great idea if you have static homepages or category pages, where it’s easy to add unique content, like on Trellis.

If you don’t have an easy way to link from relevant categories, or end up with too many Stories for this to be practical, I have an easier solution.

As with regular organic search, Google is trying to learn about the Story based on what external and internal links go to it.

Can you guess what content will be the most similar to the Story you’re writing? That’s right, the post you’re telling a story about.

Linking to Stories from posts you’re writing them about will definitely help Google find them, without the disadvantages of embedding.

4. Link to Your Web Story Landing Page

Google also wants publishers to create a separate Web Story landing page, which will feature links to all of your Web Stories, and then link to that landing page from your homepage.

I recommend going with the default landing page WordPress makes for custom post types (e.g. yourblog.com/web-stories).

Chances are, the page won’t look pretty, but it will get the links you need. So try linking to this page in your sidebar – less prevalent than your top navigation, but still noticeable enough to get the job done.

Think back to my site structure post. Your goal is to keep the landing page one click from your homepage, so Web Stories are two clicks from the homepage. (Google and SEO Like a CEO, intersecting as always.)

5. Submit Your Web Story XML Sitemap to Google

Assuming you’re running a plugin like Yoast to generate XML Sitemaps, you should have one for Web Stories. It will likely be at yourblog.com/web-story-sitemap.xml.

If not, make sure to configure your SEO plugin to generate these and submit it via the Google Search Console.

6. Naming Your Web Stories

This one is a little trickier, because you obviously know it’s important to optimize the page title for SEO, but it’s also important to remember to avoid creating duplicate page titles on your website.

Your goal is just not to trigger the Google Search duplicate title filter. Pick a name that makes sense for the keyword you’re targeting, but isn’t the name of your post. Make sure it’s enticing for the viewer, because they will see your title in Discover, over the cover image of your story.

7. Content is Still King

Google says the secret to a Web Story ranking is still all about content. In Google’s best practices advice, they recommend 10-20 slides, keeping the content per slide brief, and keeping it visual, with plenty of images and videos that fill up the screen.

They’ve since expanded on that with this article on what a web story should be.

• Make the story have value for the reader all on its own.
• Stories that are only 2-3 slides long and force the reader to the website for any useful information about the proposed topic is NOT good user experience.
• Stories that convey information about a post from a different angle can be great – such as a “making of” for a recipe or craft post.
• Stories should make sense and have a logical beginning and end.

As usual, with any “content is king” strategy, it also means you need to make a lot of content. Create stories for all of your top posts, then consider a Web Story for any new post you create as well.

Yes, it’s work, but once you see the traffic, you’ll find it’s worth it.

8. Use All the Rest of Our SEO Advice

When it comes to SEO, Web Stories are just like any other page to Google. Everything from using alt text to properly using your keywords in your content will make a difference. As Google says, “If it helps rank your non-Story pages, it’ll probably help the Stories as well.”

Additional Technical Notes

According to Markee, who as we mentioned above has already worked extensively with bloggers on Web Stories in this early stage, there are some common technical caveats to be aware of as well:

• If publishers do not have Organization Schema filled out in Yoast, Web Stories will not validate.
• If you use the WordPress Media Library to upload videos for your Web Stories, be careful of consuming too many hosting resources. Video uses a lot of storage and bandwidth. These are NOT running through the Mediavine Video Player, but rather your web host, so proceed with caution.
• If websites are running WP Rocket, you’ll need version 3.7.5 or later. Otherwise you’ll need go under “Advanced” and “Caching” to exclude Web Stories from caching. Basically, publishers can paste the following in under “Never Cache URLs” – /web-stories/(.*)
• Make sure you’re running the most recent version of Web Stories to mitigate potential errors.

Tracking Web Stories in Google Analytics

The Web Story plugin provides a place to input your Google Analytics ID, and it can automatically insert the proper tracking code for you.

You do not need the Google Site Kit plugin, despite the language in the settings page, in order to do this.

My recommendation is to consider setting up a separate Google Analytics Profile to track Web Stories. Why? Because traffic to Web Stories is not really the same as traffic to your site.

As we’ve touched on multiple times above, think of stories as ads that run inside Google Discover for your content. The goal of Web Stories should be getting users to click over to your site, that’s it.

It’s not really your traffic until they leave the Web Story experience and arrive on your website, so don’t count it as such.

If you combine stories with your primary Analytics, you’ll see a surge of users who are virtually un-monetized; all that will do is hurt your RPM calculation, while also making everything harder to track.

Markee and Google recommend you set up a separate Dashboard inside your Google Analytics in order to track the performance of your stories.

Setting up a new dashboard to easily track your Web Stories’ performance, so you’ll know how to optimize them to convert more users into real traffic, but in left inside your regular unfiltered profile or view, will still impact RPM calculations. Here is our help guide on setting up a new Google Analytics Profile ID for your Web Stories.

Additionally, to prevent the Web Stories tracking URL parameter from breaking your dashboard page-level reporting, you should set your analytics profile to ignore the following parameter: _gl .

You can follow our help doc on how to exclude a URL parameter easily in Google Analytics. Reach out to publishers@mediavine.com if you have any questions on how to do this.

One More Caveat: Web Stories Appear in Search

We’ve talked a lot about looking at these as previews or ads, in a sense, for your content. Unfortunately, since Web Stories are their own “pages” on your site, they may show up when a user searches your site.

This applies both on your internal site search itself and on Google results pages.

For internal searches, you can control this; Users can find the “exclude option” for Web Stories if they go into their Web Stories plugin, go to their list of Web Stories, and click on “Quick Edit.”

Nevertheless, there’s always some chance that Web Stories will appear in Google Search Results, and that’s just a fact of life; removing them from Google Search would negate their ability to get you traffic.

Just do your best to make sure your main post ranks better through SEO than your stories, and don’t overthink this.

Mediavine Ads in Web Stories

As of this post, integrating Mediavine ads in Web Stories is still in its very early alpha/beta testing.

If you’re receiving significant traffic from Web Stories and want to help us test Mediavine ads within them, email publishers@mediavine.com. We hope to release these ad solutions more widely in early 2021.

However, even when we’re able to monetize stories at a wider scale, there are some important caveats:

• As with other AMP ads, Web Stories will run on Google’s domain and are largely outside of our control. We can’t provide the full Mediavine ad auction or use things such as first-party data, etc.
• These are specialized, full-screen ads. There is currently low demand for them, and that means a significantly lower fill rate than you’re used to.
• Google, not Mediavine or the publisher, controls the placement of these ads, and they only appear after seven slides, which means typically only one ad per Story.

All of the above bullet points can be summarized as such:

Your ability to monetize traffic will be many times stronger on your post. If and when you can run ads on these stories, we’re still only talking about a single, low-filling ad per story.

Not to sound like a broken record here, but you shouldn’t expect to make significant revenue from the Stories themselves right now. Instead, think of Web Stories as a cool way to access an entirely new audience for your site and its great content.

We’ll keep working to improve how Stories monetize, and continue to bring you updates on this exciting platform as they develop.

The post Google Web Stories SEO: What You Need to Know appeared first on Mediavine.

Allowing for easy, effective navigation of your website sounds obvious, because every user and publisher knows (and wants) that.

So what do we mean by site structure, and why does it matter?

When we’re referring to site structure, we’re talking about how content is organized on your website — in other words, how visitors can navigate the site to find the content they want.

From an SEO standpoint, this is important enough that the Google SEO Starter Guide features an entire section on site hierarchy.

If you’ve read the starter guide (if you haven’t, you should), you’ll see that it focuses a lot on URL structure. We’ve already published an entire guide to optimizing your URL structure (see the link above), so we’re focusing on the rest of Google’s hierarchical advice in this article.

Homepage Navigation

There are a number of components of site structure, but at the heart of it all is the navigation of your homepage. Think of it from the perspective of a user first visiting the homepage. How do they get to the content?

When we first discussed PageRank, you may remember us saying that the homepage is your most valuable page when it comes to link equity.

This is because — if you’re following standard web design principles, every page will link to your homepage, either through linking on your logo, via your navigation or perhaps breadcrumbs.

It’s also the most likely place for other websites to link to, so it makes sense that it’s your most valuable page — from an SEO perspective.

Moreover, it’s the most frequent entry point for returning or loyal users, who you’ll want to present with content as effectively as you can.

This is why when we discussed cornerstone content, we emphasized that your most valuable content should be 1-2 clicks away from the homepage.

Anything beyond those 1-2 clicks, users might not find it easily from the homepage. If your users can’t find your content, neither can Google.

That’s why it’s crucial to think of your site structure from the perspective of navigating from the homepage, and ensuring that all content you want to rank on is one or two clicks away.

Okay, so how should you ideally set up your homepage navigation?

If your homepage is basically just your 10 most recent posts, then you’re probably going to struggle. The good news is that even with WordPress, your homepage doesn’t have to be set up that way.

WordPress offers publishers the concept of a static homepage, in which the homepage becomes another page you have complete control over. You can use Gutenberg to edit your homepage this way.

In fact, this is what we recommend for publishers running Mediavine’s Trellis themes. Although we included a default homepage of your most recent posts, that’s not always the best experience for users.

With Trellis, you can create custom, static homepages. Take a look at these three sites that are running Trellis:

So what should your homepage be?

That depends on your site and how you can organize your content. This is where categories, tags and landing pages come in handy.

First, you can and should list some of your recent posts. Using Gutenberg, you can use the built-in Recent Posts block or the upcoming Mediavine Create Indexes to make them look pretty.

This is key for both users and search engines to see your most recent content. Otherwise, how will they identify and keep up with it?

Beyond the new posts you’re churning out, consider the perspective of a user when it comes to finding older content as well.

Think about listing some of your most popular posts — a great way to help improve rankings on some of your cornerstone content.

Of course, there’s limited space on your homepage, and you can only have so many links on there without it becoming cumbersome. This is where your categories or landing pages can play a major role.

Category and Landing Pages

While being one hop away from the homepage will give your content the best shot at SEO success, sometimes being two clicks away is the best you can hope for — especially when you have a lot of content.

For example, this is where you could link to the “Cheesecake Recipes” category on your homepage, with the ultimate goal of boosting the “Strawberry Cheesecake Recipe” you’re trying to rank on.

It’s not just categories you can link to, either — Google recommends that websites feature a separate navigation or sitemap page.

Note: We’re not talking about the XML Sitemap.

Those are super important for crawling, but not necessarily ranking and we’ll talk about them in a future blog post.

In this case specifically, we’re talking about a sitemap page for users — a designated navigation or landing page.

Basically, you create landing pages (posts or pages in WordPress) that you can link to from your homepage, with those landing pages linking to your other pages. This keeps everything of value within 1-2 hops.

This style of sitemap can’t link to everything, but you can make many of them. Let’s use a simple example everyone can relate to.

If you were, say, the CEO of Mediavine and writing both an “SEO Like A CEO” Series and an “Improve your RPM” series, you could build a navigation page for each and link to them from your homepage.

In this not-really-hypothetical case (as you probably figured), I used two category pages: SEO Like A CEO and Go For Teal, with custom content up top. Hey, another cool feature of Trellis!

In any case, even using a static homepage with Gutenberg can only be so long before users give up on scrolling. So where else can you get links to the posts you want to rank on?

Site Navigation, Footer, Sidebar, and Other Linking Spots

Publishers actually have a few more valuable spots to link to top content on all of your pages: your site navigation, your footer and your sidebar (on desktop and wider tablet devices).

The navigation at the top of your page can link to your most popular pages. If you use a nested nav bar, you can often fit 10-20 links up top in a very user-friendly fashion.

This is a great way to allow users to find content on ANY page of your site. Think about it: If you link from every page, by definition, it’s linked from the homepage AND every other page on your website.

That’s a great way to signal to your user and Google that this page is extra important. The same rule can apply to the footer, but since that’s lower in your page, it’s less likely to be clicked.

With limited space available, try to prioritize placing your most important navigation in the header and putting lesser-used things (like your privacy policy, legal requirements, etc.) in the footer.

Another great spot to capture user attention? If you maintain a shorter sidebar, users will likely see a few widgets before they tune out. We typically recommend running things like a search, about me and something like the top posts-style widget described above.

Using these three spots, in addition to your homepage, should hopefully position all of your top content within a few clicks for users.

Finally, remember that your individual posts are a likely entry point for a large portion of your readers. This typically opens up another great spot to show additional content to readers: Both inside the content via internal links and below the post with related content-style widgets.

Breadcrumbs

Google also recommends the use of breadcrumbs in your navigation, and I completely agree. These are a great way to link to your homepage and the landing page or category containing a post.

Breadcrumbs, like so many things we touch on in passing, are worthy of a separate blog post that we’ll write in the near future, but here’s a quick look at our Vice President of Support Nicole Johnson‘s site.

See the text “Home > Grilling > Traeger Recipes” below her post title? Those are the breadcrumbs.

Site Structure Sets You Up For Success

Like so much of the SEO advice we provide at Mediavine, there’s not a lot of technical mastery you’re missing. A commitment to the right principles and the right thought process goes a long way.

Think like a user to improve your website experience, and Google will likely reward your efforts. As always, our award-winning Publisher Support team is available to help with additional questions.

The post Site Structure: Navigation Matters for SEO appeared first on Mediavine.

Whomever who coined the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” probably never considered search engines.

It may be true as far as your readers are concerned, but when it comes to Google, they’re only worth as much as a computer can read.

That’s why, when it comes to optimizing images for Google, the #1 search engine recommends using descriptive filenames for images.

Below, we break down filenames — what they are, why they’re important and how they can help your rankings.

What is an image filename?

The filename is what you probably expect. Typically, it’s the same name of the image file that lives on your computer before you upload it.

This is especially true if you use the WordPress media library and most image hosting services.

If you’re exporting photos from your camera or phone, chances are the filenames are going to be a random set of numbers and letters such as “IMG_3073.jpeg”

In this case, the filename is the same name that’s sitting on your local computer (IMG_3073.jpeg), including the extension (.jpeg).

If you were to simply upload that to WordPress and insert it into a post, then that would be the filename on the internet as well.

Why Google cares about filenames

If a user downloads your photo from the internet, its default filename when downloaded to their computer is that same filename.

Just like Google cares about SEO-friendly URL structures so it’s easy for users to see at a glance what’s on a given page, it recommends user-friendly image filenames.

The idea is simple: A user knows what a photo is without having to open the file. It’s just a better overall user experience.

SEO for image filenames

In the Google SEO Starter Guide, Google gives the same advice for writing filenames as for alt text and it’s easy to execute:

Keep things short and descriptive.

Google also wants you to use an extension that accurately describes the file type. Again, it’s easy and makes perfect sense.

For example, if you’re using a jpeg image, use .jpg or .jpeg. If you’re using WebP or PNG, use their respective extensions, .webp or .png.

Chances are your photo editing software will automatically take care of the extension for you. Just make sure that when you go to rename your image, you’re not changing this to make it less accurate.

Let’s look at a real world example of an image and how you should name it:

Now, if you had to describe this image in a few words to a reader so they could see what you were talking about before showing them the image, what would you call it?

Hint: You can use a similar description to what you’re writing for the alt text, or the alternative text for the writing for the visually impaired.

It’s the same idea: Use a name that assumes if the user never gets to see the image, they’d still know what’s in it.

Google flat out says not to use filenames like “image1.jpg” or “1.jpg” in their examples of what not to do. In other words, don’t just use what your photo software spits out by default.

Rename the file so it’s descriptive. That’s the long and short of it.

Use hyphens to separate words and don’t use special characters

An important thing to note: Since you’ll be manually naming these photos, you won’t have the luxury of WordPress making sure your formatting is written out correctly.

Instead, you’ll have to do the work of making sure you’re only using letters and numbers, and ensuring you’re using a hyphen (-) and not something like an underscore ( _ ) to separate words.

If you stick to using only letters, numbers and hyphens, avoiding apostrophes or other special symbols, you’ll be in good shape.

Should I use keywords in image filenames?

Similar to our advice regarding alt text SEO, you’ll want to use your focus keyword in your filename when it’s an organic fit.

Put another way, if your long tail keyword happens to naturally describe the photo you’re uploading, then 100% use it.

Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. If you have four photos, all described by the same keyphrase, you run the risk of keyword stuffing.

Use synonyms and vary things up so all photos in the same post aren’t called “cheeesecake-photo-1.jpg,” “cheesecake-photo-2.jpg,” etc.

Instead, think about file names much like you would your alt text, e.g. “completed-cheesecake.jpg” and “cheesecake-filling.jpg.”

Similar to alt text, if you can’t think of different filenames for every photo you’re using in a post, are they really providing value to the reader?

How long should filenames be?

Historically, filenames on operating systems were meant to be shorter. There are historic filesystem limitations, such as a limit of 256 characters, which means you should err on the side of shorter for your names.

What the heck is the human translation of that? While we’ve recommended using your alt text as guidance for your image filenames, you’ll probably want to think shorter.

Keep your filenames to under five to six words and you should be fine within any character limits, and still have enough language to accurately describe the image.

Again, these are theoretical limits with most modern filesystems and operating systems. However, it never hurts to go short and descriptive, especially when that’s Google’s advice in their SEO Starter Guide.

What about existing images?

WordPress makes it difficult to rename files once they’re uploaded to the media library, so chances are you’ll have to re-upload them.

How important is this for SEO?

Image SEO is just one aspect of SEO overall, and not the most important one. Without sweating this too much, I’d recommend you just adopt this process for images you upload from now on.

If you have an incredibly important, highly-trafficked post, it may be worth the time to give your images more useful file names.

In general, however, this is a small part of your SEO — but an easy and intuitive best practice to put in place going forward.

The post Image Filename SEO appeared first on Mediavine.

That’s right, something the visitor barely sees, let alone analyzes, in the address bar at the top of the screen matters to search engines. We’ll explain why in the latest edition of our SEO Like a CEO series.

First, let’s get the technical definition out of the way.

What is a URL?

The URL is essentially a unique identifier, used to locate a post or page on the internet. It’s made up of a few technical parts:

Some URL components are optional and not listed here, including the user / authentication and ports. For this post, we mostly stuck with aspects that publishers who are worried about SEO should consider.

Scheme

On the web these days, this is generally just http:// or https://. At this point it’s hardly a secret that TLS/SSL is an important ranking signal for security reasons, so we’re down to just https:// as your scheme.

Host

That’s the technical name, but for all practical purposes, you can think of the host as the domain name you registered, e.g. WittyBlogName.com or in our case, Mediavine.com.

It also includes any sub-domain, such as www., which we use for Mediavine.com and our owned & operated sites such as The Hollywood Gossip.

Path

The path is the main part that we’ll be talking about today, so more on this below.

Query Strings

Google, by default, will index ANY query string it sees. This means that, by default, it sees things like the ?fbclid that Facebook adds to any URL as a different URL. This is because they are in fact different URLs.

We’ll dig deeper into this in a future blog post, and also delve into the use of the URL Parameters tool in Google Search Console. For now, just know that query strings uniquely define URLs and be wary of any tools you use that may add these to your page.

Fragment

As its name suggests, a fragment points to part of a page. Fragments are what powers things such as Jump to Recipe and Table of Contents, by pointing to a specific section of a page.

These are NOT considered separate URLs by Google, so they are also often used by plugins and tools for other tricks.

How URLs matter for SEO

So how does all of this impact SEO?

In their SEO starter guide, Google offers a similar technical breakdown of what we just provided for URLs, along with additional advice that can basically be boiled down to three points:

1. Simple URLs. Google gives an example of an unhelpful folder and random numeric page URL vs. a descriptive one, e.g. /article/ten-rarest-baseball-cards.html. Translation: Make URLs easy for people to read/know what they’re clicking on from the URL alone. Very similar to Google’s advice with anchor text.
2. Use words in URLs. Google wants you to use descriptive words inside your URLs. What’s more descriptive than your keyword or keyphrase? Translation: Make sure you use your keyword inside your URL, but as always, stick to reasonable keyword density and avoid keyword stuffing.
3. Use a simple directory structure. Folders, or directories in your URL — such as the “articles” in /articles/fun.html — are important but don’t have too many of them. Keep it as flat as possible and make sure the folder is descriptive of what’s inside. As for whether or not to include dates in your folders, we’ll get into that more below.
4. Provide one version of a URL to reach a document. This is another topic for a separate blog post, but in short, make sure there aren’t multiple URLs that reach the same piece of content. Canonical URL and redirects can help handle this — more future blog post topics!

Use hyphens for word separation

Another big piece of Google advice is to keep a simple URL structure. If you have multiple words in your URL or file names, make sure you use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words. For example, write /seo-guides/url-structure.html instead of /seo_guides/url_structure.html.

If you’re running WordPress, it will automatically convert any spaces to hyphens, which is great! However, when uploading images or other files, make sure you name them with hyphens, not spaces or underscores.

Are URLs a ranking factor?

They are, but not a defining one.

I like to point out that YouTube and Amazon have absolutely terrible URL structures that follow none of Google’s advice (particularly ironic in the former’s case, as Google owns YouTube).

These two household name juggernauts of the online world violate every rule, including not using useful words in URLs. Instead they use random characters and numbers, and guess what? They still rank.

Google even admits in its starter guide that it can learn to parse even the most complex and inadvisable URL structures. But does that mean you shouldn’t care about URLs?

No. You should still do your best, and not just because you’re not Amazon. There’s the human factor involved as well.

URLs are shown to the user in search results, so even if they’re a smaller ranking factor, they’re important for a user who is searching for topics. They help the user decide whether to click to your site in the 1.2 seconds you grab their attention, much like the meta description.

However, if you happen to have a less-than-ideal URL structure, it’s not the end of your site, so think twice before trying to retroactively “fix” this. More often than not, incorrectly attempting to change url structures, such as not properly handling redirects, can cause more harm than good.

Do dates in URLs matter?

A quick note on the frequently asked question about URL dates. When you select your permalink structure in WordPress, you’ll be presented with several options. In the early blogging days, most publishers opted for the date format, e.g. http://www.domain.com/2020/09/blog-post/.

While the date of a published article is useful to some potential readers, this format is less than ideal. As we mentioned above, you want to keep things short and eliminate additional characters that aren’t search terms, which usually (though not always) includes the month and year.

As far as altering URL structures after the fact, I typically advise against it, as it involves a LOT of redirects. We’ll talk redirects more in future posts in this series, but in short, they are often slow, don’t always pass on full link equity and sacrifice a lot of your social proof.

Changing URLs is not fun. What I wish is that WordPress would come up with a solution to this for future posts you write, because that would be ideal. In our SEO Like a CEO series, you’ll often hear me say to fix things going forward.

Hint, hint: Great plugin idea for someone!

What permalink structure should you use?

I personally always vote for the simplest, which is the “post name.” This has no folder, and is what’s known as a flat URL structure. You can see this in the article you’re reading: mediavine.com/url-structure.

I know Google’s advice is folders, and that useful names are important. If you have different object types, such as we use on Food Fanatic, something like /recipes/recipe-name.html and /videos/video-name.html make a ton of sense and are a great idea.

But if your site is entirely blog articles, adding something like /articles/ doesn’t provide any value; therefore I’d recommend just skipping it.

I have seen people use custom URL structures and including a category to satisfy the Google goal of a folder hierarchy, but again, I wouldn’t stress. Flat, or “post name” structures will allow you to rank just fine and are extremely readable for potential users.

Does your domain matter?

Yes, it does. Again, we like to err on the shorter side, as chances are your domain is not a keyword. If it is, great job. Having keywords in there will only help with your rankings.

In most cases, extra words are just taking up valuable space. Think back to the keyword density and keyword proximity advice we gave before. You want your keywords to appear as early and as far to the left as possible. Long domains push useful keywords further to the right.

Note: This advice applies only to choosing a NEW domain. If you have an existing one, please don’t rebrand. It’s bad for ad revenue and SEO. So bad that we’ve written multiple articles on why rebranding is a bad idea.

Unless your domain is absolutely terrible, I would rarely recommend stressing about it, let alone changing it.

Keeping it Simple

It’s important to remember that your URL structure is a ranking factor for Google and will have an impact on whether users click through to your articles. As a result, you should keep your URLs as short, simple and readable for humans as possible.

However, please don’t stress and blow up everything you’ve built if you have an established URL structure that doesn’t sound ideal after reading this. Just think about it as you write new articles, or if you set up a new website down the line.

The post SEO Friendly URL Structures: Choosing The Right Permalinks appeared first on Mediavine.

When a user first arrives on a page from search engines, the first impression is everything that loads in the first screen view.

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The post Above the Fold SEO: First Impression is Everything appeared first on Mediavine.

But how much do they really matter for SEO, and how should you use them?

Glad you asked, because that’s the focus of our SEO Like a CEO series today!

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The post Heading Tag SEO: It’s All About the Outline (and the Audience) appeared first on Mediavine.

But what is accessibility as it pertains to the web?

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The post Alt Text SEO: Building Better Rankings and More Accessible Experiences appeared first on Mediavine.