To clarify the consequences of their force, let me first summarize the eleven commandments that I had taken from YOAST and with the implementation of which I have so far always been able to get green YOAST ‘traffic’-lights — one for “SEO” and one for readability. Just for the sake of completeness, let me second note that I could successfully apply for indexing at Google for the pages prepared accordingly.¹

Solution

• Define a key phrase that reflects the subject² of your page.³
• Just as defined, put that key phrase at the beginning of your page title.⁴
• Just as defined, integrate that key phrase somewhere into the first paragraph of your page, too.
• Include that key phrase in the meta description of your page, which must have at least 120 and no more than 156 characters
• Link your post to other pages on your blog about the respective topic.
• Link your post to external pages about that topic.
• Write only a few sentences with more than 25 words.
• Link your (short) (main) sentences by (logical) conjunctions.
• Do not let your paragraphs ‘swell’ over 150 words, or at least stay under 200.
• Use only a few passive constructions, and make active statements.
• Explicitly request Google to index your new page in the Search Console.⁵

Background

One thing in advance: If you already think that this post does not follow these rules, let me tell you: Yes, it doesn’t. Intentionally. Let us test by this article what happens if we don’t submit our posts to the unifying dictates of Google and YOAST.

The result of these ‘recommendations’ is a different writing style than you and I (occasionally) prefer. It’s known that passive sentence constructions are more difficult to understand and thus require more reading work.⁶ And it’s known, that our reading life is made easier by short sentences. If we are forced by search engines to write this way, they are doing our readers some good. Even if we are ‘gently’ moved away from the academic writing style via the threat that our texts will not be indexed.

Hence, this does not annoy me. The thing with the key phrase, however, does. Because it prevents me from arousing a desire to read the following article by a merely suggestive title, and from letting concrete meaning and context of the headline grow out of the first sentences. Free associations — that’s what I like to work with. Actually. But I can’t, if I want to obey the commandments. An example: In my first run, I had titled my article ‘Clouds and Lists — 2 on 1 Stroke’ as ‘2 in 1 Stroke’ by which I hoped to open a little associative space linking my post to the fairy tale brave little tailor.⁷ ‘2 in 1 Stroke’ — that is an elegant title. Prefixing it with the key phrase ‘Clouds and Lists’ takes the point out of the title and makes it unwieldy. Additionally, repeating the key phrase in the first paragraph turns us into pushy babblers — just to get our green YOAST traffic lights and become part of the Google index.

A good example — from a SEO point of view — is the page https://wolf-of-seo.de/was-ist/fokus-keyphrase/. Here, the key phrase focus keyword is placed at the beginning of the title and immediately repeated in the first, very short paragraph — together with its twin focus key phrase. And in the first six sentences⁸, these phrases occur more than 10 times. The ‘wolf of seo’ should not have any problems getting his page indexed. And even more: the content of his article is very informative! Only stylistically — stylistically it is grotty. If you read the post slowly, you will surely notice its redundant verbiage. The annoying thing about the dictates of good SEOcity is that we obviously have to write like this if we want to be indexed. Because only what is indexed can be found and ranked at all.

If you’ve read the wolf-of-seo’s article slowly, read my article in the same way. And you will notice that it is even more grotty than his! Because I have intentionally violated the above commandments:

• My key phrase ‘styleXpolice’ does not appear in the title, in the first paragraph, or anywhere else, hence not even in the slug.⁹
• I’ve included a ‘meta description’ that is intentionally too short and misses the topic.
• This post uses links to external sites, but internal links to other pages on my site.
• My text uses too many passive constructions¹⁰, has one too-long paragraph¹¹, and uses too long sentences¹².

Because of these deviations from the rules, I got an orange YOAST traffic light for this post in terms of SEO and a red one in terms of readability.

Thus, we can now test, how long Google takes to index this article.¹³ As soon as it has been indexed, I will let you know. But you can also try it by yourself. Just ‘google’ for ‘SEOcity’. This word exists as a noun (so far) only in this article.

• Sitemap updated: 2023-08-27 / evaluated: 2023-08-27 (maybe earlier than updated)
• Post found: ????-??-?? / crawled: ????-??-?? / indexed: ????-??-??
• Indexing manually ordered: ????-??-??
• Post found: ????-??-?? / crawled: ????-??-?? / indexed: ????-??-??

1. by using the option of the search console to hand over a URL manually.
2. The wolf of seo says that the keyword phrase should not capture what your post is about, but what your post is perfect for. But if you apply the rules 2 and 3, the difference between these viewpoints shrinks considerably.
3. Keep in mind: Use only 2 words, at most 3. Because in that form, the key phrase must be placed at the beginning of the title and integrated into the body text. Do not trust YOAST to be able to understand syntactic variants — even if it promises to do so
4. If you shorten the resulting slug of your page, use at least speaking syntagms in your URL.
5. Don’t rely only on your updated sitmap.
6. If you don’t believe that, you may deliberately ‘torture’ yourself through this intentionally passivated paragraph
7. Unfortunately — after having read story again in its entirety — it makes me a little uncomfortable myself. It is already a bad dazzler, that brave little tailor, not only a sly one. So, the story does not open an associative space into which I would like to blow myself
8. which — in this case — is equivalent to: in the first 6 paragraphs
9. Inside of the post, I can not write this word as I’ve really used it (without an X), because otherwise, YOAST says “The keyphrase was found 1 time. That’s less than the recommended minimum of 5 times for a text of this length.”
10. “17% of the sentences contain passive voice”
11. “1 of the paragraphs contains more than the recommended maximum of 150 words.”
12. “31.9% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%”
13. In order not to compare pears with apples, I will first inform Google about this new post only by an update of my sitemap. Some months later, I will also request Google manually to index this post.

The post My Googlized Writing Style appeared first on FODINA 4 FOSS.

Solution

• Replace all schematic slugs with talking ones.
• Link every post and page to all other internal, related posts or pages.
• Install YoastSEO.
• Implement so many improvements suggested by YoastSEO that its traffic lights turn green.
• For every single page and post, explicitly ask Google via the Google Search Console to index that text.

Background

What has happened, that I changed my mind? After submitting my sitemap sometime in April, Google had indexed only 6 of my 109 pages over 3 months. It did not grumble about the quality. It simply announced that it had found 81 pages or posts and had crawled 17, but had not indexed any of them. Google did not consider my texts worthy of indexing. Despite my interesting topic, ‘bootScore’. And in spite of the articles being so relevant, they could inspire the project ‘bootScore’. In this situation, trying to improve my ranking was nonsense: what’s not indexed, is not found at all.

It took me a while to understand what had happened. And it took me even more time to fix that:

While migrating to bootScore, I wanted to condense my site. It should become more reader-friendly with less redundancy. Fewer bells and whistles. That’s why I mapped my thematic clusters onto categories and tags and properly assigned my texts to them. I wanted to take advantage of what bootScore brings to the table on its own. On each page, our readers can call the related posts by clicking on the assigned keywords. So why should I additionally link a post to related ones manually? Why should I hook individual pages or posts into my menu? A clever guiding system of categories without any additional inner linking should be enough.

But that’s exactly what Google sees differently! Pages that are not linked to other pages on the same site are not important — apparently, even in the eyes of the author. Otherwise, she would want to lead her readers there. So why should Google index them? My textbooks((Pars pro toto: cf. Czysch, Stephan: SEO mit Google Search Console, 2. Ed., Heidelberg 2017, pp. 168ff)) had always pointed out that! It was my fault to ignore that.

Just, as my fault for grouping my posts with nonspeaking ‘slugs’: If I — for example — used a cluster ‘image’, I thought I could name my posts ‘image‑a’ , … ‘image‑i’. So, I had the same page names on the German and the English sites. Also, a bad idea that causes Google to take the posts as unimportant.((pars pro toto: cf. Dziki, Julian: Suchmaschinenoptomierung für dummies, 2. Ed., Weinheim 2021, p. 62)

After having understood these side effects, I reworked everything. I replaced the symbolic page names with speaking ones. I installed YoastSeo and implemented so many of its measures concerning the topics ‘SEO’ and ‘readability’ that the respective traffic lights switched from red to green. Or at least to yellow. All in all a very time-consuming work.

Nevertheless, there was still no inner linking with it. That’s why I wrote a summary for each of my thematic clusters and linked its words to the intended ‘siblings’ of posts and pages. Moreover, because — in the Future — I would have to update these summaries often, I reduced my typing work by implementing these summaries as ShortCodes. So, a simple string at the end of each post and page would integrate the respective internal linking.

Nevertheless, the real indexing breakthrough came only after I had submitted each post and page individually and manually to Google Search Console for indexing — including the time-consuming indexability checks for each text. Now Google has indexed 84 of my 74 articles and 18 pages of my German site. What still is not indexed is indeed less important, like my privacy page or the image proof. And on my English site it looks even better: of the currently offered 53 posts and 15 pages, 114 are indexed — from which we may derive that the Google index still contains outdated links. For those, however, I preferred to follow the recommendations of the textbooks right away. I implemented respective redirects with the plugin ‘Quick 301 Redirects’.

So what was the decisive measure for success? I’m afraid it takes all of them. Even if I had to change my writing style to do it. Especially in the implementation of YoastSEO recommendations. But more about that later. As soon as Google has indexed this post. Always first things first.

And how does this …

… support our migration to bootScore? Well, if a web designer must abandon her current WordPress theme, she needs a replacement. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she probably wants to personalize. First a bit cosmetically, then in terms of the gray value of her pages, multilingualism and internal reference techniques and linking. Finally, she perhaps enables special footers, a secondary menu or a copyright notice before checking the SEO features of the selected theme. This is a way that this post supports too.

The post Internal Linking — a Reset appeared first on FODINA 4 FOSS.

The classification by semantic HTML tags and good performance speak for the relevance of a site. That is reasonable. However, such measures to improve one’s own ranking are undermined by ‘broken’ or ‘dead links’. They are no longer served, neither by content from within nor outside. Once they reach such a link, the search engine crawlers cannot complete their work. From this, the search engines conclude that such an ‘unmaintained’ site will not be as important, as it pretends to be: What is annoying for the readers, also annoys the search engines.

But broken links are easy to find and fix:

Solution

• Install the plugin Broken Link Checker
• Activate it.
• Go to Tools/Broken Links in your WordPress dashboard.
• Clean up each defective link.
• Disable the plugin until the next check.

Background

A link checker plugin is ultimately a site’s own crawler. Like a search engine, it crawls all built-in links. Those who refer to unreachable servers will be admonished, as well as those whom the responsible server claims to be unable to serve.¹ If you have a list of such links and the positions where they occur, cleaning them is only a matter of craftsmanship.

The proper sources of the plugin Broken Link Checker are hosted on WordPress’ own Subversion repository² The readme file therein says that the Broken Link Checker is licensed under the “GPLv2 or later”.

There are occasionally warnings about this plugin: It could degrade the performance if it works continuously. However, this can be easily prevented by activating and deactivating it on a case-by-case basis.

In addition to the Broken Link Checker, the Google Search Console, and the Bing Webmaster Tools also provide information about irregularities. And there are external tools for this purpose, too. But I think it’s better to start with the obvious.

By the way, the opposite of a broken link is an orphaned page. If such pages exist on a WordPress-based site, they are hard to find automatically because — by definition — there is no link pointing to them. Here, the human look into the own sitemap is more helpful. Orphaned posts — on the other hand — do not exist as long as the standard post loop is still called somewhere.

And how does this …

… support our migration to bootScore? Well, if a web designer must abandon her current WordPress theme, she needs a replacement. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she probably wants to personalize. First a bit cosmetically, then in terms of the gray value of her pages, multilingualism and internal reference techniques and linking. Finally, she perhaps enables special footers, a secondary menu or a copyright notice before checking the SEO features of the selected theme. This is a way that this post supports too.

1. Error 404
2. GitHub offers a clearly outdated version.

The post bootScore & SEO: No Broken Links, please appeared first on FODINA 4 FOSS.

<main>, <aside>, <article>, <header>, <nav> and <section> are meant to show search engines what is important in terms of content and what is not. Including these tags properly is the job of a WordPress theme. In bootScore, <main> delimits the central content from “subordinate stuff” in all templates. <aside> marks the thematic side section the sidebar.php, <header> important headings, and <nav> the less important navigation elements. Even the tag <article> is used correctly in index.php to separate the teasers of the individual articles as thematically independent areas. bootScore knows its craft.

What is missing is keywording and an outline of the site structure, the sitemap. These aspects are not the job of bootScore but are necessary for successful sites. Fortunately, we can realize both with plugins:

Solution

• Verify that your theme uses semantical HTML tags
• Skip the tagging with keywords
• Create the sitemap:
  • Install the plugin Simple XML Sitemap Generator.
  • Call Settings/Simple XML Sitemap Generator
  • Change ‚Add WordPress post category to the Sitemap?’ to yes.
  • Modify any post for starting the scan.
  • Call https://your-blog-domain.xyz/sitemap.xml — it’s generated now.
  • Be a bit paranoid and verify your sitemap by [https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html]
• Make the sitemap known to Google:
  • Clear the cache of your browser!
  • Using your Google Account, log in to [https://google.com]
  • Call [https://search.google.com/search-console/]
  • (If you already have any sitemaps, create a new property)
  • Insert the domain of your site https://your-blog-domain.xyz
  • Download the Google identification file.
  • Upload this file into the root directory of your site.
  • Let Google verify the upload.
  • Go to the dashboard of your Google Search Console.
  • Select the menu item sitemaps.
  • Insert https://your-blog-domain.xyz/sitemap.xml.
  • Press the button send
  • binGOOGLE
• Make the sitemap known to Bing:
  • Using your Google Account (yes!) sign in to BING webmaster tools [https://www.bing.com/webmasters/]
  • Insert the domain of your site https://your-blog-domain.xyz
  • Load down the file BingSiteAuth.xml
  • Upload BingSiteAuth.xml into the root directory of your site
  • Press the button verify.
  • Go to your Bing webmaster dashboard.
  • Select the menu item Sitemaps and insert the complete URL of your sitemap https://your-blog-domain.xyz/sitemap.xml
  • BINGo

Background

Key Wording

RankMath is currently considered a must-have, but it is not an Open-Source plugin: Although openly developed on GitHub, the repository does not contain any license file or a licensing statement.¹ And if it talks about its ‘free download’, it refers to a ‘free’ but ‘severely limited feature set’

YOAST — probably the best-known WordPress SEO plugin — is true GPL licensed Open-Source software. It uses a business model that is reasonable from a free software perspective: If you need the service of getting new versions etc. ahead of time, beyond just using it, you are in good hands. But we do not need the PRO-Version. Even the free version does what is necessary.

On the one side, YOAST tries to inaugurate a ‘Focus keyphrase’ for each post. And it enforces the author to use this keyphrase in different contexts. That’s supportive. On the other side, it also tries to put a second keyword-based text ‘behind’ the actual one only accessible for the search engines. That is reasonable for product sites that essentially consist of images. In other sites, this ‘SEO specific text’ doubles the really readable text. But saying things twice doesn’t make them more important. Not even in the ‘eyes’ of the search engines:

Search engines ‘loathe’ keywords. Too often, authors have tried to fool them with content that their text did not contain. Therefore, the rule today is, at best, one focus keyword per page or article — matching the text. But this word often already occurs in the reading text — perhaps even in the headline. To cut a long story short: Tagging with keywords? — Maybe. But I wouldn’t put too much effort into it. It’s better to spend that time creating good content.

That’s why I refrain from trying to enrich my content with keywords (and outdated meta tags). I’ve done that long enough in the past. And I only ever felt I had to write my text a second time unnecessarily.

Sitemaps

On the other hand, search engines love sitemaps. Without them, they would have to “read” everything, evaluate all the links, and go to every page to get a complete overview. They can do that, no question. We know that as web crawling. But it takes time. That’s why search engines often try to minimize their effort by means of heuristically motivated “shortcuts”, such as indexing only the first page of a site. This would be fatal for a thematically heterogeneous blog.

To compensate, search engines give sites the opportunity to determine for themselves what should be indexed — through a sitemap.

There exist some open-source sitemap generator plugins for WordPress, e.g. YOAST, the Google-Sitemap-Generator, or the Simple XML Sitemap Generator. At first, I wanted to leave it with the WordPress own generator. That generates several sitemaps linked into an umbrella sitemap. But that makes Bing and Google stumble: The Bing Webmaster Tools show only the number of linked sitemaps themselves. So, the site administrator doesn’t know if the content ‘underneath’ has ‘arrived’. And Google Search Console often says it could not retrieve or read some (embedded) sitemaps. Actually, this is not a big deal. Because Google comes back. But until then, Google has interrupted the indexing. So the more sitemaps we submit to Google, the more likely it is that not all of them can be read the next time, and the worse the indexing rate.

So it is better to use one sitemap that directly contains everything. That’s why I finally gave the Simple XML Sitemap Generator a try. According to the Readme.txt in its repository, it is licensed to GPL‑2.0 or later.  An integrated sitemap.xml let us — perhaps — wait longer in the Google Search Console until the traffic light changes from red to green, meaning ‘understood’. But if it’s green, everything is green.

A final remark

Even 25 years after Google entered the search engine stage, the relevance of your content is still determined by your readers. Accordingly, the number of links to your site is taken as a benchmark. At this point, link farms come to mind. They were a reaction to Google’s rating algorithm. Against inserting small coins, one could buy links to one’s pages and thus pretend relevance to Google. Google, for its part, developed counter strategies to detect such abuse. In other words: SEO was ever embedded into the “competition between good and evil”, between those who searched and ranked and those who wanted to be found and ranked well, for better or worse.

Engaging oneself in this struggle is futile. Effort and result are out of proportion. Eventually, it is cheaper to directly buy a ‘sponsored’ link at the top of a hit list. For all those who do not want to do that, it is enough to

• write good content
• use the semantic markup of HTML5
• provide a sitemap without dead links
• and have your pages delivered fast enough.

And how does this …

… support our migration to bootScore? Well, if a web designer must abandon her current WordPress theme, she needs a replacement. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she probably wants to personalize. First a bit cosmetically, then in terms of the gray value of her pages, multilingualism and internal reference techniques and linking. Finally, she perhaps enables special footers, a secondary menu or a copyright notice before checking the SEO features of the selected theme. This is a way that this post supports too.

1. last check: 2023-07-19

The post bootScore & SEO: Semantic Tagging, Key Wording, and Sitemaps appeared first on FODINA 4 FOSS.