Weekly News: Shopify SEO Gets Easier With Yoast App

06/01/2022

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Shopify SEO Gets Easier With Yoast App

Optimizing Shopify product pages and blogs gets easier with Yoast SEO, which launches this month and offers the same features as the popular WordPress plugin.

Slated to launch on January 18, Yoast SEO for Shopify will be available in 27 languages and come with a 14 day free trial.

After the trial period, Yoast SEO for Shopify will charge a subscription fee of $29 per month.

If you’re familiar with Yoast SEO for WordPress, which has over 5 million active installations, you’ll know exactly what to do with the Shopify app.

Here’s a rundown of key features:

SEO analysis: Helps with optimizing your posts for desired keyphrases. Yoast’s understanding of related keyphrases and synonyms helps you write naturally.
Readability analysis: Create SEO-friendly product pages and blogs with real-time readability analysis that shows show how and where your content can be improved.
Automatic structured data: Yoast SEO automatically adds important structured data that helps Google understand what your website is about.
Social media previews: In addition to visualizing what your products and posts look like on Google, you can see how they’ll look when they get shared on social media.

Why Shopify?

If you’re familiar with Yoast as a company, you may be aware that it has only supported open-source platforms.

That may lead you to wonder why Yoast is suddenly supporting Shopify, which is closed source.

Yoast addressed that question in an announcement, noting the obvious that this allows the company to sell its product to more people.

But there’s more to it than that, as Shopify creates opportunities for small businesses to sell products directly to consumers, rather than going through a third party.

What About WordPress?

Yoast SEO for WordPress isn’t going anywhere and will continue to receive the same level of support.

The company affirms it remains committed to “Five For The Future,” which is an initiative where companies pledge 5% of their resources to the WordPress project.

Source: Shopify SEO Gets Easier With Yoast App

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Source: The ultimate social media guide to building your brand in 2022

Best Buy to sell search ads under its own in-house media company

Best Buy has launched Best Buy Ads, its own in-house media company, the consumer electronics retailer announced Tuesday. Best Buy Ads offers paid search ads and sponsored product listings on Best Buy’s website, among other ad offerings.

E-commerce’s explosive growth over the last two years has been accompanied by growth in digital commerce advertising as well. Bes t Buy Ads offers a marketplace that brands can use to get their offerings in front of customers, providing them with another Google alternative (even though it’s an alternative with a much smaller, more focused audience) as well as a new channel with which to engage customers during the discovery stage.

“We interact with our customers three billion times a year — in our stores, in their homes, and online,” the company touted in the announcement. Those interactions can provide meaningful data to target customers for brands that sell products at Best Buy or simply offer complementary products.

Source: Best Buy to sell search ads under its own in-house media company

Microsoft releases IndexNow plugin for WordPress

Microsoft Bing has published a new WordPress plugin that makes it easy to integrate your WordPress blog and site with the IndexNow protocol. The plugin was released over the holidays and is available over here in the WordPress plugin directory.

What is it. The WordPress IndexNow plugin enables automated submission of URLs from WordPress sites to the multiple search engines without the need to register and verify your site with them. Once installed, the plugin will automatically generate and host the API key on your site. It detects page creation/update/ deletion in WordPress and automatically submits the URLs in the background. This ensures that search engines will always have the latest updates about your site, Microsoft wrote.

What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for websites owners to instantly inform search engines about latest content changes on their website. IndexNow is a simple ping protocol so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results.

Currently both Microsoft Bing and Yandex have adopted the protocol, but Google is supposedly testing it out as well. IndexNow is used on over 60,000 sites that use CloudFlare.

How it works. The protocol is very simple — all you need to do is create a key on your server, and then post a URL to the search engine to notify IndexNow-participating search engines of the change. The steps include:

Generate a key supported by the protocol using the online key generation tool.
Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your web site.
Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call.

The WordPress plugin makes this easier and you don’t have to go through all these steps to set it up.

How to install. To install the IndexNow WordPress plugin, follow these steps:

Log in to WordPress admin panel for your WordPress site. Click on ‘Plugins > Add New’.
Search for ‘IndexNow Plugin’ and install.
Once installed, click on ‘Activate’ to enable plugin.
Go to IndexNow admin page and click ‘Let’s Get Started!’

Source: Microsoft releases IndexNow plugin for WordPress

Google fixes user and permissions issue with Search Console

In November, Google’s Caio Barros posted a notice in the help forums that there was “a problem” in Google Search Console’s user interface where “Full Users” see their status as “Delegated Owners” within the settings ownership verification section of Search Console. Well, Caio Barros confirmed this is now fixed, a couple months later.

The issue. The issue was that when you went to the ownership verification section in your Search Console settings, you would see your status as “Delegated Owner.” But you would not be able to see the “Users and Permissions” option on your account. That means you were likely a Full User and not a Delegated Owner, but Search Console didn’t show that.

Now resolved. This issue is now resolved, Caio Barros wrote yesterday “this issue should be fixed now.” He said “if you are a Full user but don’t have ownership (i.e., don’t have permission to add and remove users), you’ll see a message like this,” which says you are “not a verified owner.” Caio said this new message makes it super clear and unambiguous.

Now, if you really are an owner and wish to delegate ownership to another user, you can now go directly into the user management settings in Search Console and set the user permission to “Owner.” Then the user will see their ownership verification as delegated owner. They are still not a verified owner, but can manage users and permissions,” Caio explained.