 Here's our next speaker, and I hope you're not going to hate him after this one. In the true spirit of the WordPress community, if I see a big elephant in the room, I want to dress it. I want to make it feel welcome, right? So, considering your interest in the topic, I am going to assume that you're all Moeke fans, and I need your help. If you hear people talk about just a pretty life off, Have you ever heard her speak? Have you ever seen the passions far from her eyes? Have you ever noticed the expertise? Or did you maybe not break a listening edge with you? Smart guys make sure they have smart girlfriends, they marry, they stay loyal to, and the smart lives are the ones that help the smart men bounce off ideas, keep focus, and find balance, right? Good. So, when I asked Marika why she was so passionate about site structure, she told me, you know what, that's one of the things that's not often talked about, not by far often enough, and it's actually one of the things that is at the basis of SEO success, and it gives you quick results, because like we probably all know, SEO is like that snowball that starts out tiny, and you have to really put in the elbow grease to get the results. So, I'm very, very happy that Marika is going to talk about this important topic today, make notes, spread love over the interwebs, and give her a warm round of applause. Thank you. I'm all right. Yes, I'm all right. Thank you, Yvette, also for calling me pretty. Yeah, I like that. Telling it as it is. So, hi everybody. I'm going to talk about site structure and SEO today. My name is Marika van der Racht. I am one of the co-owners of Yoast. Does everybody know what Yoast is? Everybody knows. You don't know what Yoast is. So, we have a plug-in, a WordPress plug-in, and it helps you with your SEO. So, at Yoast, I do a lot of blogging. I write about site structure and content SEO, about copywriting, and I'm actually the founder of Yoast Academy, which is now a sponsor. It's our online SEO courses platform. And together with Yoast, Michiel and Omoire, who's not here, we run Yoast. So, what is site structure? Well, it has to do with how you organize your posts, pages, products on your website. That sounds rather straightforward, right? Well, preparing this talk, I noticed that it's not that easy at all. It has to do with lots of things. So, maybe you think of categories, sub-categories. You're right. That's site structure. Taxonomies, tags, also site structure. But site structure has a lot to do with internal linking, and that's something that's becoming more important, especially for SEO. And it also has to do with keywords, because if you're structuring your site, you need to think about the things that are most important to you, the words you want to be found for. So, all these things are important while focusing on site structure. So, the topic became really big, very fast. So, today I will be talking about site structure in relation to SEO. And when SEOs talk about SEO, they do it a lot, they pretty much always are talking about Google. And, of course, there are other search engines out there, but Google is by far the largest one. And if you have been to WordCamp Europe in this past year, you've seen the amazing booth they had. Google has shown a huge interest in WordPress, mainly because we're about one-third of the web. So, we're looking at Google, but they're also looking at us, which is nice for change. We've established what my talk will be about. It will be about site structure, which is really, really hard, and it will be about Google. And now I want to tell you a little story. And maybe some of you have heard the story before, so please don't tell how it ends. So, once upon a time, there was this girl, and her name was Alice. And Alice would get up every morning, and she would get out of bed, and she would sit down at this beautiful old desk. And there was this typewriter on the desk. And then she would sit down and write a story. And she would type a story, and after she is done, she would pull out a sheet of paper, she would read her story, she would smile because she really enjoyed her own writing, and then she would just throw that piece of paper on the floor. Next morning, same thing, Alice gets out of bed, sits down and writes a new story, throws that story on the floor. So after a year of writing, she has 365 pieces of paper laying on the floor. After three years of writing, they're more than a thousand. No, they're almost a thousand. No, they're more than a thousand. I'm not very good at math. Alice never filed anything. Alice never structured anything. So what happened? Her stories got lost. She wanted to find that beautiful story about a boy and a rabbit, but she couldn't find it because it just got lost in the mess. And you know, it's not that different for your website. If you do not structure your website neatly, your stories will get lost, your visitors will get lost, and Google will get lost. You see her sitting there, just not knowing what to do. Yes, very sad. So you all have this image of Alice sitting there with these thousands of stories, and you get that something needs to be done. But let's look at the theory behind it. Why is such structure very important? So there are three reasons why such structure is important. The first one has to do with the user or the reader. If your site is well structured, people will find what they are looking for. They can easily navigate through your site, they can find that blog post they want to read or they can find your products. So that's the first one. If Alice would have made the effort to categorize her stories, maybe put little postage on it, and it would be much easier to find those stories back. Right? She did that. We made her do it. So such structure is important for the user. But what does it has to do with Google? Why is it so very important for SEL? Well, the way a website is structured gives Google important clues on where to find the most important content. It gives Google clues on how things are related and where to find it. And in order to really understand that, you need to know a bit more about how Google works. So what does Google do? Search engines, like Google, the other ones are the same, follow links. Google consists of a crawler, also called a spider or a bot, they have very many names for the same thing, an index and an algorithm. So Google saves everything, the entire web, all the content of all the websites, on a database which is called the index. But how does Google know about the existence of a website? Well, in the old days, you had to tell Google about your website. Well, not Google, but the other search engines. You had to tell them, hey, here I am and I have a website. And then they would put you in the index. Google was the first search engine that changed that game. They just follow links. So how does this work? You need to have at least one external link for Google to know about the existence of your website. And then it comes around with that little spider thingy, it follows that link and then it finds your website. And the next step, it will save the information on your website, the content, your links, headings. And it will save that in that big database which is called the index. And then it goes and crawls some more. And whenever something changes on your website, it will save the changes in the database because Google wants to have like a database which is totally new and up to date. For some pages, Google will come around very, very often. While for other pages, they will not come around very often. And this all depends on the number of visitors you have and the number of changes you make on your website. So now what? Your website is in the index and now it will just magically show up, right? Well, sort of, but your page is not the only one. So there's a lot of competition. Often there are millions of others for ranking for the same search results. Searching for WordPress SEO will give you 22 million results. Sorry. I know. Yes, but Google has this algorithm. I was going to tell about this now. That knows exactly what to put on the first result. So the algorithm is the thing that's the site which websites will show pop-up highest. These are all kind of ranking factors in it like number of links pointing towards it and a site speed and many, many other things. So I've explained a bit about how Google works and maybe you've already noted. So there was a bit of a site path, but it's really important because I want to make sure why did you understand why internal linking is so very important. Because Google follows links throughout your site, your internal linking structure is the path that Google will follow. So that's your tools to make sure that Google crawls all the things and put all the content in the index. And it's also a ranking factor. So the first thing is that Google will know about the existence of all your pages on the website because you point towards it, because you link towards it. And if you link very little, so very few links towards a certain post, then that post will be deemed as less important. If you only have one link pointing towards a post, Google will think that post will be less important than if you have like tons of links pointing towards it. So with your internal linking structure you are able to influence which pages will turn up highest and which will be lower. And then there's a third reason. We talked about the user, we talked about Google, and there's another reason why such structure are important which also has to do with Google. So on your blog, on your website, you probably are writing about similar stuff. So in our case we tend to write a lot about SEO and I actually wrote like nine or ten blog posts about side structure. But if you do not tell Google which one of these is the most important, Google will not know. And if Google doesn't know, then it usually isn't a good thing. And then it could be, maybe the case, that all of your blog posts tend to rank lower because Google will allow you for only to have one or two results in the search engine results pages. So you have to tell Google which one is the most important one. And that's also done by side structure. So with your internal linking structure you can tell Google which pages are important and which pages aren't. And that will keep you from competing your own content. You're already competing with all the other ones out there for those places in the search result pages. You should not be competing with yourself. Remember Alice? If Alice would not pick her favorite stories and put them on top of the pile, each of these piles, then nobody would ever know which one is the most important to her. So in your case you need to decide for yourself whether the pages or the posts on my website are the most important ones. Which do I want to put on top of my pile? That's a really hard question. Now I told you why search structure is important and it's a really big subject and I can give you like tons of tips on how you should improve upon it but I cannot cover them all in this talk so I'm going to give you three important tips to get you started. And the first tip is to focus on contextual linking. I need a bit of context for this, Tim. So as SEOs we're pretty much left in the dark about what Google is doing and what the latest trends are because Google doesn't say much. So what you can do is to study patents. Whenever Google has this new piece of technology they want to own that. So they request a patent. You can do that in the United States. And then whenever a patent gets granted the content of that patent becomes public. So you can study those and then you can know a little bit of what they are doing in Silicon Valley. And Wils Lorski, he's like this SEO patent veteran. He studies all the patents. You should follow him on Twitter. He says really amazing and smart things. And he says that context is the search term the year of the year 2018. And what keeps coming back lately so I agree with him is that context is becoming more and more important. So Google does not just rank your tax on the term ballet shoes just because you use that specific search term in every other sentence. Google is getting more and more able to really grasp what a text is about. Google can read texts. I'm going to explain the related entities pattern. This was one of these patents that came to our attention this year. And the related entity patterns basically says that Google has created this database in which it saves things that belong together. Thank you. So for the ballet shoes these could be things as ballet recital, ballet lessons, things that belong with the word ballet shoes. And Google is just machine learning through the internet and whenever certain concepts turn up together and at different places then Google will see these things belong together and saves them in their related entities pattern. And with that they're getting better and better in understanding which things belong together. You can see that on the internet. Google understands questions. If you ask Google what is yours then Google knows that people are searching for the best SEO for WordPress because these are related things. Yeah, Google is very smart. If you search for Tagliatelli you will also get pasta and spaghetti. Google knows that these things belong together. So this is consequences for your SEO copywriting. If you're writing text and want to rank for Tagliatelli it could well pay off to write about pasta and spaghetti as well. And maybe not optimize only for Tagliatelli. So I think that exact matching keyword so putting the exact keyword you want to rank for in a text in every other sentence is getting less and less effective. You need to focus on synonyms and related keywords as well in order to make sure that you keep on ranking. We're on it in your SEO. It will take it just a little while and then we have functionality for synonyms and related keywords. A few weeks. Yes, but it's not the way it should be yet. Yes, it's a very awkward moment. Next, for your content, for your writing it's also very important for structuring your website context. You need to have contextual linking. So if Google is able to read a text it's also able to see whether or not a certain link is in context. Whether a certain link makes sense. And Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it more accessible and useful. It wants to present the best result to the user. So it's going to check whether or not the link you've put in there is actually a link that people will want to click on and would like to read on. So these things have to make sense. They have to be in context. So the text, the sentence in which you place a link is going to be important. That's what we mean with contextual linking. Linking from related posts to one another. And that's something you should be doing. It basically comes down to this. Internal links are important to get your site indexed to just get it in the index. But the context of internal links is important to get your site. Right. This is hard. It is. Especially if you have a lot of content. So in Yoast SEO it's like a commercial talk. It's really a great tool. We have this analysis in which we analyze your text and see what's about and then suggest on basis of those text on the words they're using. We suggest internal links you can add to your site. You still need to do it by hand. There's no tool that will help you do it all. Yes. SEO is... I don't know. It was there for seriously effort. Yes. Yeah. Nothing by hand. So we've come to my second tip. So contextual linking first. And now I'm up to talking about identifying orphaned content. Orphaned content is very sad content. That's the content that you forget to link to. And it happens to us all of the time. You write a blog post and it's pretty nice. And then of course it has a link because you've published it so it's on your homepage. But then afterwards you forget to link to it just because it's not top of mind or maybe you're working with multiple authors and you do not link to the posts of other authors. I did that before I noticed that we were doing that. So you just don't know that that post is out there. You just forget. Is that a bad thing? Well it is. If that post is important to you, if you just forgot to put links on it, then Google will not as easily find it and put it in the index. It changes. You're not making change at all if you forgot about it. And it will not get that article ranked. So of course there are orphaned content that should just be left alone and be orphaned content. But in the large scheme of things you would like to have some links pointing towards your orphaned content. So try to figure out which are, of course you can do the NCO, you can just figure out which of your articles are orphaned content and put links towards them and making them less sad. They are just, nobody will ever find them again, these kinds of articles. And then we've come to my final tip, which is the most important one, which I've been thinking a lot about lately. And this has to do with cannibalization. I'm going to explain what it is. And I think that's something we're all going to be facing. And at Joost we're facing a lot of it, just because our website is becoming really big. It's not getting that. It's getting really big. So what's happening if you have been blogging for quite a while, then you probably are writing about similar topics. And that's where the things might go wrong. So keyword cannibalization happens when you optimize for terms that are the same or closely related to each other. And I already told you that you can only rank like one or two or maybe three times in a search engine result page. So if you have a lot of articles about the same topics, then it could be that you're competing with yourself without even noticing it. So in my case, I wrote two articles, both about readability and whether or not ranking factor. And I wrote them at different stages and they're really different. They have a different approach and the content is different. But I'm using the same words. So I think Google will not know which one of the two it should rank highest when somebody search for a readability ranking factor. They will both turn up. And we have a lot of more of these examples that we are trying to get better at. So how do you know if you're suffering from keyword cannibalization? Yes. Well, that's really easy. You can check with Google, with a site search. So you type in site and in my case yost.com. So then Google will search on your domain. And then the thing you might have cannibalization in. In my case readability ranks. And tada! The two articles I was talking about pop up. So these two are ranking for the same keyword. So what can you do about it? Well, you can make sure your site structure is awesome. So if you can point to one of the two and say this is the most important one, then you can make sure that you link from the one post to the other and make sure that other posts are also linking towards that one, the most important one. So in this example, we have this ultimate guide for site structure. This is our most important article on site structure. And then I wrote like a bunch of other ones. And these all point to our site structure ultimate guide. And then you're telling Google this is the one you should rank highest with. This is the most important one. And that actually helps. That will actually help rank that one most important one. Much easier and much higher. So that's a great strategy. But in my case, I'm not even sure which one of the two is the most important. I wrote two articles about readability. And I don't know. Well, if I don't know, Google will know you need to do something else. So what we should do here, and we're going to do that because this is such a nice example. So we haven't changed it yet. So what you should do then is to combine those articles and make one really awesome article out of the two. And that's a bit of work. But you'll end up with one really good, well written, lengthy article Google will love these. And then you can delete the other ones. Delete, not delete, never delete. You should redirect the old one to the one you're saving. So you end up with one new article. And I think that's something that's going to be a lot of work. We're working on it. And I think because the internet is growing, many other people should be doing the same. If you have a lot of different blog posts about the same topic, then maybe you'll need less and you'll have to clean up a bit afterwards. This never ends. I'm almost finished. This never ends. Cleaning up your site structure never ends. It's like cleaning up your living room. If you do not do that every other day, then it gets cluttered. And if you are making a lot of changes on your website, especially adding a lot of pages or posts, then you have to clean up every now and then. Because without knowing it, your site structure is growing and getting unbalanced. And that's not a good thing. So this just needs a lot of work. As Yvette pointed out, site structure is one of my favorite topics because it's so very actionable. You can start changing today. You can easily see whether or not you are suffering from orphan content or from keyword cannibalization. And you can add those links. And if you do not have to rewrite anything, it can go really, really fast because adding links is not that much work. So it's something that you can do and that you can influence without focusing on all these other parties. That's what I like about site structure. So, my key takeaways. Google follows links and therefore internal links are really, really important. And then I gave you three tips. You should add contextual links because context is getting more important. You should identify and solve orphaned content and you should never cannibalize. That's like a really good tip even in real life. Don't cannibalize. So thank you for your attention. Thank you so much for that. That was really helpful. Any questions? And before I invite someone to speak out, I'd like to remind them to please repeat the question for the recording. Questions? Please? Well, you should... Oh, I... Hi, people in the camera. If I have a good example of what a contextual link should look like, it should be links that are related. So you should be linking towards a post or a page that is related. So if you're writing about ballet shoes and then are linking towards baseball, that's weird. If you're writing about ballet shoes and you're linking towards something about a ballet recital, that makes sense. So a contextual link should make sense. So the sentence in which you put a link should make sense. It's just common sense. And I think most of you are doing this right, but sometimes people are using links just to put in some links. And you should not do that. Thank you. Those links which are not contextual... How about links that are not contextual? Contextual doesn't hurt your target page. Well, for crawling, it will not. So for crawling, it will just index it. But for rankability, I think it will. Because then Google will notice that you're putting in links that don't make sense and that will not be good for your ranking in the long term. So it will come down? Yes. Please go ahead. In the canal, it's a really hard word. Cannibalizing. You have article A and B. So do I rewrite one of them or do I get a totally new one? I would rewrite one of them. I would rewrite the one that will give you the most traffic already and then redirect the one that's left open. So you rewrite A and then... Yes. And put B on A. So there's no C. No. The B is gone. But the B would be gone, people at the video. But it's redirected. So your linking power will remain. So don't forget to redirect. No. I never just delete because then you get 404s and Google will get really, really mad. What do you suggest? People who already have content and haven't cared about SEO and have seen people just installing an SEO plugin and expecting the work to be done? I've seen those too. What do we do with people who just write and think that it will just magically happen and what do you say to those people? Well, SEO stands for seriously effortful optimization. Yes, it's not a trick anymore. Maybe for the Netherlands sometimes tricks still work because the Netherlands has a very small language area and Google hasn't shown that much interest in the Netherlands. But overall it's just you need to have a good website in order to keep your customers happy because otherwise they will go to the competition I think only if you're the only one there. And to keep Google happy. I should fire those clients if you're able to but I don't know if that's possible. Not quite, but if you have the content already and then want to optimize it, what's the best strategy? Well, if you have the content already and you want to optimize it I would install our plugin and you can get started with making optimizations in the text and also in the linking structure because we have this tool that analyzes all of your blog posts and sees and can check which articles will be good contextual partners and you can make your own structure with saying this is the one that's the most important and then we'll get that started just like in a matter of minutes. No, that's not true. Yes, yeah, redirecting. Should I link to posts at all? I have the feeling my pages are my most important content and my posts are spread out of time and all pointing towards those pages. That's a hard one. I would link to them because otherwise they will be totally left really low in your structure. You're right that you want to really link towards your pages because these are your landing pages but you do not write those posts just for fun, right? So you want them to have at least some chances in a search engine maybe for really long-tail specific keywords and you'll need some internal links as well. I would put more like this but I would put some down. Then I repeat the question. No, sorry. Should you link at all to posts or should you just be linking towards your pages, your landing pages? So sorry, yeah. Any other questions? Lee? You were talking about the most important blog and that other blog also linked to that one. That blog, is that the same thing as the blog? Yes. I'm repeating. He asked me, I was talking about a blog or one of my blog posts and then the other ones were just pointing towards this slide. Yes. So the site structure or the ultimate guide of site structure that's the cornerstone while the other ones are like long-tail variants. They're all focused on lengthier keywords and they're all pointing towards that one but we still have links in the ultimate guide pointing towards them back as well. Not of all of them but too few. Let me get you to repeat those two important words. Cornerstone content? Yes. Long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords. Okay. What happens if you make everything? I think they're all then the same. What happens if you make all the content cornerstone content? So you can check a box in a plugin indicating this content is cornerstone. If you do it with every single blog post then it will just... Yes, you've defeated the purpose. It will just like... Treats all of the posts in the same way again. So then it's just pretty much useless. But you can do that, you should do that. Okay, nice. Don't do it on the side that you want to make money with. No. Okay, I think we're already past the time. One last question. We have this client and they have an area. They deal with some company who makes highly optimized pages for them and then tells them to put the link in the footer of the website. So the company says they have to put their link in the footer. It sounds like something that's not entirely how we do SEO. But I don't know. I have to know more about how it exactly works. It's like a trick. Whenever it sounds like a trick, it usually is a trick. And then it will work. And it will especially work in the Netherlands for a while now. And then it will be like... Then Google will not like it in the long run. So I don't know. Maybe we can talk to each other later. You can tell me more about it. Okay, thank you so much for again. You're welcome.