No it’s definitely not a premium thing. I have a test site that has free Yoast only and both the OPTIMIZE SEO DATA button and the text link counter work just fine. If it’s not working for you, perhaps it could be a plugin clash? Or something else in your setup that’s preventing it from working.

Hi Eb, pretty sure it is just a premium thing as it’s not clickable for me at all, while all the features are. Wish it was free as I would love to use it but it’s the only premium feature I really care about and it’s not worth paying for just that.

No the text link counter is not a premium only thing. However, the interface has changed slightly since I wrote this. You now need to go to Yoast >>> Tools and click the purple button marked OPTIMIZE SEO DATA. Once you’ve done that you should get the info in your post overview. (And thanks for highlighting this – I’ve now updated the post!) Eb 🙂

Thank you.

A pleasure… and I think I have a good answer to your question. I would make the continents your categories as you suggest, I would then make the cities sub-categories of those continents (remember categories are hierarchical and this is a really logical hierarchy!) Finally I would make ‘types’ of holidays, such as ‘wildlife’ and ‘scuba diving’, TAGS. The point of tags is for topics that cut across your categories. And again, this is a really good example of that. You could go on a wildlife holiday in Africa, or Asia, or North America etc. You can then put the ‘wildlife’ and ‘scuba diving’ tags as menu items too… so people interested in those kind of holidays can quickly and easily go to the tag page (or a custom page you design) and see just those types of holidays. Your menu items can be anything you want, they don’t have to be categories… for many blogs (like this one) it does make sense for the menu to be your categories. But for yours it may make more sense to have your ‘wildlife holidays’ and ‘scuba diving’ tags in your menu bar instead. I think, if you structure your blog like this, you will make your site very user friendly for your visitors…which will ultimately put you in Google’s good books! Good luck with it all! Eb 🙂

Thanks for another useful article.
I am finally creating my blog and have a question about the best way to use the category’s, subcategory’s and tags for my kind of blog.
It’s a travel blog so I made a destination page where you can click on the continent, the continents are also a submenu on my menu bar.
I will make the continents each a category (but this will be like 7 category’s in the future).

When you click Africa you will see a “countries or destinations in Africa” with a picture and name of the country’s. I will make these country’s subcategory’s. What about the city’s? should I just make these tags? Is this good so far?

Now my problem is I also want a category for wildlife and scuba diving to show up on my homepage and in my menu because that’s also a huge part of my travels.
Now my question is when I write a post about like “shark diving in South Africa” and I put it under the Africa category and South Africa sub-category, how do i get it in the scuba category and wildlife category? Do I just put a tag like scuba diving and wildlife in the post and go to the scuba dive page and manually insert a picture with link everytime? I want people who look at my blog to see wildlife or scubadiving to be able to easily navigate there in the menu and homepage instead of going to Africa –> South Africa and see if there is an article about it. But I also want people who are going through my South Africa page to see the articles.

It’s a bit difficult to explain here, I hope u get my question haha.
Thanks again for the article

A pleasure, Giri 🙂

Thank You Eb for your time.

Core web vitals is quite a specialist area. And to be 100% honest, I haven’t given it enough attention yet myself. There is only one of me and I cannot do everything all at once, so I have to prioritise. (Something I talk a lot about on this website!) Core web vitals is on my list to focus on in early 2021. In the meantime, I recommend you take a look at these articles, which should help:

https://www.mediavine.com/google-page-experience-signals-coming-may-2021/
https://www.mediavine.com/lighthouse-6-web-vitals/
https://www.mediavine.com/google-page-experience/

And you are right, right now (November 2020) my mobile site speed is not great. Periodically I work on site speed, get it really good, and then Google changes something and it’s not any more – if I wanted perfect site speed all the time, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else (money generating activities for example!) Which is why I schedule in a tune up, maybe once a year.

But… and this is really important, I still get really good traffic (and earn a good income from blogging). Site speed IS a very important component of SEO, but it is just one of many. And nowhere near as important as having lots of high quality content people are actually searching for. You can still do really well on Google with mediocre site speed. But if your content is mediocre, it doesn’t matter how fast your blog is, you won’t do well on Google.

(Not saying this is the case for you, I have no idea how good or bad your content is – I am just saying this as all too often bloggers obsess over site speed at the expense of content, money generating activities etc.)

Hope this helps!
Eb 🙂

Thank You Eb for your clarification.

Most of my posts are opinion based so after sometime it will be outdated so no use of editing the article. As you mentioned I’m also updating the article if its really worth to update.

I have been blogging past 10 years but I’m concentrating on SEO only past 10 months… thats why I’m here 🙂 .

The below question is additional. Sorry

You know that Google is going to implement Core Web Vitals in May 2021. My page is faster with Cloudflare APO (pages open in a second) but page ranking is poor in google Pagespeed insights. Why?

in Core Web Vitals also all pages are in poor. Even your page is also low score in pagespeed insight (mobile). I’m confused.

My site is faster in mobile but Google Pagespeed insights gives low score for mobile. How Google is calculating the matrix? GTMETRIX has given A grade for my site.

I understand that all the tools are using different matrix / algorithm but Google insigthts score difference is lot thats why I asked.

What should I do for getting good url in Core Web Vitals?

Thank You