Before we even talk about the power of using Yoast SEO Plugin, What steps have you taken to ensure that your WordPress blog is friendly for search engines? If you can’t answer this question, now’s the time to take a step back and reassess your situation. Conversely, even if you’ve taken some action, there’s still room for improvements.
In the past, I’ve discussed the best plugins for a new WordPress site. I’ve also touched on some of the top plugins for creating high-quality content. And while all of this is important, you don’t want to overlook anything that you can do to improve your blog’s SEO.
WordPress is well known for being SEO-friendly “out of the box.” Even so, with thousands of WordPress SEO plugins to choose from, a few additions to your blog may be all that you need, in order to reach the next level.
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From WordPress SEO by Toast to XML sitemap, know that there’s a WordPress SEO plugin that can help get you there. A good example of this is the Yoast SEO Plugin. So, what is it and how does it operate?
What Is Yoast SEO Plugin?
Yoast SEO Plugin is one of the most widely popular WordPress plugins around and it’s easy to understand. Why? Simply, because whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re an SEO professional managing a website for a client, Yoast is a powerful WordPress SEO plugin to consider.
It’s an SEO tool for everyone! That can greatly help you make your site as search-engine-friendly as possible. Being one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market today, it helps you create an automatically updated XML sitemap for your website.
In addition, it helps you preview your content’s search snippet so you can see what site visitors see. And even gives you the green light when your content is SEO optimized. Likewise, you can also add meta tags, and even set canonical URLs for your website.
Eventually, this allows you to avoid duplicate content and Google penalties. You can also integrate it with your Google Search Console too very easily. So that you can see how search engines are indexing your site and fix any crawl errors that exist.
What does the Yoast SEO Plugin offer?
To be a successful blogger or to make your blogs outstanding and loved by all, quality content and SEO is the key. Quality content includes clean, informative, and easily readable content that is arranged in an appealing way.
Creating a quality rich SEO blog post is not an easy task. First, you need to be clear about the topic you are writing or the idea you’re going to share. Then you need to prepare a structure of your blog post, how you’re going to start, what will be your main body part, and how you’re going to conclude it.
Be sure, your content must be 100% original because original content is the foremost consideration for quality and SEO-friendly content.
Yoast SEO Plugin is a WordPress Tool that can guide you in creating SEO-friendly blog posts very easily. For one thing, it’s a complete content analysis plugin that helps you to improve both SEO performance and content readability.
Likewise, it also checks whether the focus keyword you used is appropriate or not. As well as the density of the keyword, readability, and all other aspects. Below are more key features that Yoast — both free or premium — does offer;
1. Flesch Reading Ease
Yoast SEO analyzes your content and tests the Flesch reading ease score. Flesch reading ease is the readability test that checks how difficult a passage in English is to understand. This test measures word length and sentence length.
So if you have written very long words and sentences many times, it is not good from both SEO and readability perspectives. Therefore, Yoast SEO indicates the Flesch reading ease score. Then, you can change the length and difficult sentences to a simpler ones and improve readability.
2. The Right Meta Description
Yoast SEO suggests for the right Meta description, Meta description is responsible for improving click Through Rate (CTR) from Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs). It is the part, from where your readers would get an idea about your core content and decide whether to read your post or not.
Since an optimized meta description is a very important factor of SEO, Yoast SEO helps in optimizing meta descriptions. It defines the appropriate length of meta description (~160) and shows it through color indication.
Meaning, if your meta description exceeds or lowers the appropriate length it shows a red indication. While, on the other hand, if your meta description is average and needs more improvement it shows orange color.
3. Provides Keyword in Important Locations
To be ranked well in search engines and easily reachable by your targeted audience, you must have crafted your keywords strategy very well. Only the right keyword in the right place gives the right results.
As I have already mentioned above, using keywords in various parts of the article is crucial, but it doesn’t mean you can stuff keywords everywhere just to increase your keyword density. In a few parts of your post, you must use keywords in order to get indexed in a good-rank search engine.
For the new bloggers, it might be difficult to differentiate the location where the use of a keyword is a must. In this case, Yoast SEO is the optimal solution. For sound SEO, you should use keywords in the article intro/heading section (in the first 100 words of your post).
As well as in the title of the post, the URL of the post, the content of the post, and the meta description. Yoast SEO checks whether you have used keywords in these five important parts or not, if you haven’t used there, it will index that in the improvements suggestion box.
4. Yoast SEO WordPress Focus Keyword
Focus Keyword is the keyword through which your audience finds you. For the blog post, we generally use long-tail keywords (with multiple words) and they are more specific. Yoast SEO plugin has a separate field to integrate focus keywords.
Once you set your focus keyword, the plugin analyzes your page/post content and give suggestion to improve the content for that keyword. Normally, Yoast SEO suggests removing stop words (if used in focused keywords) so quickly.
And then, it checks the keyword density in the content. Thus, if it is marked low, you can try to edit your content as you add a few things to it. Bearing in mind, if you increase your keyword density wherever possible, you’ll also improve SEO performance.
5. Internal and External Links
Needless to say, the internal links in your content are yet another important factor for better SEO performance. Internal linking helps to establish site architecture and spread the juiced link.
External and internal linking is not only important for better SEO, but also internal link integration in your articles. It also provides more resources to your readers so that they trust you and the words. The presence of the internal link and external supporting links shows your contents are research-based.
Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin evaluates whether your content contains internal and external links or not. If not, it will suggest adding. This way, it helps to make your blog post SEO friendly.
6. Photos and Images
Only the post full of text is dull. Using images and other media in the post makes it clear, attractive, and informative. It enhances readability and is important in terms of SEO as well. Yoast SEO checks whether the post contains images or not.
And suggest using images in the analysis box. Also, the plugin suggests using the focus keyword of your post as an ALT attribute of the image used. It helps your images to be indexed by Google under a certain keyword.
Besides, the Yoast SEO Plugin evaluates your text structure, the length of your content, and the strength of your post/page title. As well as, usage of transition words, the length of content under each heading, etc. In the end, it gives you feedback on each point.
How to Use the Yoast SEO Plugin
First, you need to be clear about the topic you are writing or the idea you’re going to share. Furthermore, you’ll need to prepare a structure for your blog post. For instance, how you’re going to start? What will be your main body part? And how are you going to conclude it?
As such, be sure, your content must be 100% original because original content is the foremost consideration for quality and SEO-friendly content. Secondly, your contents’ readability matters to the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin and Readers at large.
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Unless your content is easily readable, understandable, the information or ideas you deliver through it won’t matter. Notably, both the search engines and audiences scan the text structure. So, to make your content readable use a simple text structure.
In that case, don’t write very long and confusing sentences, this distracts your readers. On seeing the overview of your blog post, the audiences decide whether to read the whole post or not. And, in the same way, are the audience search engines like Google.
Who scans your text structure or overview to define the rank of your post. Therefore, to please your search engines and audiences, using clear paragraphs, headings, subheadings could help. The main reason for writing a blog post is to make it reachable to a wide range of audiences.
Learn More: SEO Tutorial For Beginners: How To Start With SEO?
So, you should write your blog post in such a way that it would be loved. Particularly, by search engines and give you a better ranking. And the first strategy for it is keyword-focused content. But, before you start with content writing, it’s important that you know your target audience first.
By doing some keyword research and then using those keywords in your writing. Search Engine loves original, readable, and keyword-focused content. But, remember keyword-focused means not keyword-stuffed. To get started, make sure that you learn How to Install and set up WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast in detail.
What is the Cost of Premium Yoast SEO Plugin?
Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin has both free and premium versions. If you need advanced SEO features, then you can switch to a premium version. Yet the free version comprises all the essential features required for creating a high-quality and SEO-friendly blog post.
No doubt, Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin is the ultimate SEO solution perfect for both beginners and experts. The way Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin evaluates your SEO performance and suggests improvements, rarely another SEO plugin has these features.
The plugin not only helps to attract more visitors to your site also increases your reader’s engagement. It helps you to best optimize your SEO performance, readability, and be better ranked in search engines.
Does the Plugin really work?
Of course, Yes! It’s powerful, makes important SEO things easy to do, and can be a really helpful writing tool. By making sure your content is an SEO tactic. But, don’t get carried away when you see bloggers all over Pinterest calling Yoast “The Ultimate SEO Plugin”.
As a whole, Yoast is an awesome, powerful tool. In particular, that does (at a guess) 70%ish of the stuff you need for SEO, even the advanced stuff. It excels at SEO tech and backend and makes it super freaking easy. You can see it at work in the video below.
You may not even be aware of some of the ways it’s helping your site out and some of the tools it gives you. On your bucket list, besides Yoast, there are other additional SEO tools to look out for.
Consider the following:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Broken Link Checker
- Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
- W3 Total Cache
- All In One WP Security & Firewall
- WPtouch Mobile Plugin
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
- Seo Optimized Images
As you search available WordPress plugins, you’ll be surprised to find just how many are devoted to SEO-related tasks. While it’s a good business practice to learn more about each WordPress SEO plugin at your disposal.
Furthermore, you don’t want to bog yourself down with too many. Generally, to protect against this, get started by considering your Website Theme Design and SEO Structuring with the Top 10 WordPress plugins detailed above.
Related Tool: All in One SEO Pack | An SEO Plugin for WordPress Sites
In nutshell, if you are looking for high traffic to your site, then the Yoast SEO Plugin can greatly help. It is a very simple and intuitive plugin. To go with it, you don’t need to be an SEO expert or need to hire one. Anyone can use it with ease.
This plugin is all that you need to maximize your Website SEO friendliness. Having said that, feel free to Contact Us in case you need more help with your site SEO or other related blog topics to this one. You can also share your opinion thoughts and any questions in our comments section.
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