[00:00:35] We've talked about the search appearance section of Yoast. We've talked about cornerstone content, and this week we're gonna be talking about two things actually, but they are both found in the advanced section, which, you know, we tend to avoid that section because by golly, we don't feel like we're ready for the advanced section at all.
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[00:01:23] or shared with a peer for just a quick once over. And then you likely took that feedback and typed up your first copy to turn in. And then depending on your instructor, they might have had some edits that you needed to take care of before submitting that final edited copy. Back when I was in school, we were often asked to attach our rough drafts and previous copies so that
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[00:02:11] Instead, you likely arranged the drafts in chronological order with the most important version, that final copy, on top. Because one of those papers was definitely more important than all of the others. And so you're doing a similar thing when you take care of SEO tasks on your blog post. You're making sure that Google understands what is most important on your website.
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[00:03:07] And these are both found in the advanced section of the Yoast plugin. Now, if you're anything like me, when I was just starting out with SEO, you likely didn't even open that menu, so we're gonna take a deep breath and dip our toe into these features because it's important to know what they mean. The first thing I wanted to talk about is the canonical URL.
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[00:03:55] You also don't want to get in trouble with Google. When you have multiple posts with similar content you could get dinged for having duplicate content on your website. This can send signals that your website is spammy or Google might pay more attention to a less important version of the post. And so when you provide a canonical URL, so you've written a post, you've opened that menu, and you're putting a URL in there, you are showing Google that this post, this piece of content that you've just written is important and it should belong in the index.
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[00:05:00] Yeah, that's because a different version of a post doesn't necessarily mean that it's just a straightforward revision of old content. There are many ways that you can end up with different versions of a piece of content, and one that would be the most relevant to you as a teacher business owner is if you create resources for multiple grade levels.
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[00:05:49] So you decide to write a post for third grade pirate escape room, another one for fourth grade pirate escape room, and then finally a fifth grade pirate escape room post. Now, all of these pieces of content are going to be pretty similar, right? For those grade specific posts, you could put your original general escape room post as the canonical URL.
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[00:06:42] I've seen a rule of thumb that if 80% of your content is essentially the same between two posts, then you really should identify the canonical URL. And if you're listening to this and you're still thinking, I'm not sure if I should be using canonical URLs or not, you can actually kind of take a look at your existing Google search console data to see
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[00:07:31] That means that you're creating content that Google considers duplicate, but you haven't added the canonical URL. It's unlikely that you have any that meet this criteria, but it is worth keeping an eye on it, especially if you're in a situation where you're writing similar posts for multiple grade levels.
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[00:08:15] If you started your blog way back in the day when blogging was a bit different, you likely have some content that at this point is just for you. It might just be memories from the classroom, you know, your pictures or those blog posts that read like journal entries, what your class was up to that week.
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[00:08:59] You can use the no index option in your SEO plugin to tell Google that this information really isn't worth the resources to crawl and index the post. When Google is only crawling and indexing your strong, optimized content, Google will start to view your website as more strong and optimized. So also, when you're sending the bots on a wild goose chase through your old classroom journal posts, you're not pointing them in the direction of your most important content.
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[00:09:53] and that option is for allowing search engines to show this post in search results. And if you don't want it in the index, you'll select no. If you use Rank math, you'll find this feature, the advanced menu, I think it's like a toolbox icon, and when you click on that, you'll see a checkbox for no index.
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[00:10:39] I hope that this episode has given you the courage to open up that advanced menu in your SEO tool. We didn't go over all of the fields in that menu, but these two were the most important and most applicable ones for us to discuss right now. Now, was there a point in this episode or other episodes this month when you thought, man, I wish I could see a screenshot of what she's talking about?
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[00:11:27] You can also find the link in the show notes.
