If you use WordPress, you’re likely familiar with Yoast SEO. One of the platform’s most popular plugins, Yoast analyzes content and provides insights on how it can be improved for SEO and readability. However, while it’s a useful tool, using Yoast can be a frustrating experience. If you’re like me, your initial encounters resulted in hours spent tweaking your content to gain the plugin’s approval, often to futile effect. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?” I asked myself that very question, and the answer I found was…well, it’s complicated.

There are several good reasons for business owners to blog, but perhaps the biggest is that, more than ever, SEO is dependent on content. With the demise of “black hat” tactics like keyword stuffing and a re-emphasis on user experience, content has become the core means through which SEO strategies can be effectively implemented. That means if you want your business’ website to perform, you need to produce content. And there’s no better way to broadcast that content than through an active blog.

The term “tag” may be one of the most common in the SEO lexicon, but its meaning is far from homogenous. While most tags are basically HTML code attributes that describe webpage content, it can be hard to distinguish between meta tags, title tags, header tags and others. And then there’s the practice of “tagging” your posts, which is something else altogether. To cut through the confusion, we’ve defined the most common types of tags and provided a brief explanation of each one’s function.

When it comes to promoting a business website, good content is critical—after all, it not only improves SEO, it also shows visitors you’re an expert in your field. However, as it’s often said, “It’s not what you know but who you know,” which is why an equally important asset is the connections you make with other sites. This practice of creating digital connections is known as link building. 

"Put on the glasses."

In John Carpenter’s 1988 cult film, They Live, a seemingly ordinary pair of sunglasses gives the protagonist an unsettling glimpse of the reality just beneath the surface of everyday life. When viewed through the shaded lenses, a commercial billboard reveals a single subliminal code word: “OBEY.” An advertisement for a clothing sale simply reads, “CONSUME.” As our hero soon realizes, nothing in this metropolitan setting is as it seems.