Why is Yoast SEO Your Best Choice for WordPress Plugin?

Posted by Parth Shah on June 10th, 2021

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular and significant WordPress plugins. It helps webmasters and SEO experts optimize their WordPress websites for ranking high on the search engines. 

Yoast SEO is like your virtual assistant that offers a lot of effective techniques for website optimization. It helps to improve your content’s readability and SEO. Thus, it enables your website to be more accessible to the users as well as search engine crawlers. With Yoast SEO, you get advanced control over how your web pages appear. 

A Beginners Guide to Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Yoast SEO is one of the best beginners tools. It provides a step-by-step installation and setup. So once you install the plugin, it will ask a few questions to know about the basics of your website. When done, you are all set to optimize your WordPress website and content using this plugin. 

So if you have written a blog post, you’ll want to use the Yoast SEO Plugin for content optimization before you upload the blog on your website. Here, you’ll get the following tabs on which you need to work for optimization. 

  • Focus Keyword

  • Readability Analysis

  • SEO Analysis

  • Google Preview

  • Facebook and Twitter Preview

  • Schema

  • Cornerstone Content

Let’s have a closer eye on each part. 

  • Focus Keyword

This section will help you with your objective to rank on Google for certain keywords. The focus keyword is the first thing that appears on your Yoast SEO plugin. Here you need to put your target keyword on which you want to get your blog ranked on the search engine. You’ll get the focus keyword for your content based on your keyword research. So once you put your focus keyword here, Yoast SEO will show you some feedback on how you have used the keyword in your content. 

There are some color bullets that indicate the performance of your content. Red bullet means some serious modifications are needed to make the content SEO-friendly. Orange bullet means the content needs a few improvements to be SEO -friendly. And Green bullet means your content is SEO-friendly and is good to go. So you need to follow the instructions to make the bullets green. 

  • Readability Analysis

Under the focus keyword section there comes Readability analysis. In this section, Yoast SEO shows you the report on the readability of your content. It determines how easy your content is to read for the users. Based on some factors like the use of passive voice, consecutive sentences, the length of the paragraphs, length of each sentence, use of transition words, the plugin provides an individual score. And all the individual scores add up to a total score. A readability score of 60 or more is always good. 

Readability is an indispensable factor for a good SEO and higher SERP rank. You lose your readers if your content has wrongly structured sentences or bad grammar or unclear meaning. So by using the Yoast SEO plugin and the suggestions, you can improve your content, optimize it further and make it user-friendly. Make sure your content shows a green bullet beside the readability tab on the plugin. 

  • SEO Analysis

Next comes the SEO Analysis tab. Like the previous section makes sure your content is reader-friendly, this section makes sure your content is search engine friendly. This tool helps you review the word counts of your meta description, your use of keywords, links in the content as well as in the snippet elements. Based on such analysis, the plugin gives you individual scores and an overall SEO score of your content. 

WordPress is the best CMS for the SEO of your website. And Yoast SEO significantly helps you get the maximum SEO results by optimizing the contents of your website. So follow the feedback you have got from this SEO Analysis section and make sure the bullet is green. As we have already discussed, a green bullet means you are on the right path. 

  • Google Preview

In this section, you’ll see a preview of your website on the search results. Although this preview is not 100% assured of the actual view, Google can always make changes to its search results. However, SEO-friendly and well-optimized content are good for your website’s ranking. It also hints at the trustworthiness of your website. 

  • Facebook and Twitter Preview

Like the previous Google Preview section, this section gives you an idea of the appearance of your post on Facebook and Twitter. Here you need to personalize a few key parts of the post like the description and the header to enhance the effectiveness of the post. Although posts on social media don’t really impact the search engine ranking of your website. But the number of shares and engagements of your post on social media helps you increase traffic to your website. 

  • Schema

The customizable settings in the schema tab help you to make the search engines understand the type of your content. You can choose the type of your individual posts and pages on this tab and specify your content. This specification helps search engines categorize your content and understand it properly for ranking. 

  • Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content is the content that’s vital to your website message. It can include longer or more elaborate contents that describe your industry or niche. So you need to mark your new website post as the cornerstone content of your website in the meta box. 

Other Advanced Features on the Yoast SEO Plugin

After working for some time on your Yoast SEO, the best of all WordPress plugins, you must be willing to move towards using its more advanced features. Some of the features are:

  • Webmaster Tools: To confirm the account you have on Google Search Console.

  • Advanced: Here you can create the canonical tags, add the no-index tags to your posts and pages, and modify your robot.txt settings as well.  

  • Internal Linking: This feature is available in the premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin. It eases out the internal linking task.

  • Sitemap: Yoast is a good place to create the sitemap of your website. 

  • Search Appearance: In this section, you can modify a lot of the settings of your WordPress website. 

  • General: Here you can show your preference on the bifurcation of the title of your web page and the name of your website. Also, here you can modify the SEO settings of the homepage of your website. 

  • Content Types: It enables you to select the default settings for all the posts and pages of your WordPress website. 

  • Taxonomies: Here you can create rules and regulations for your WordPress tags, category pages and many more. 

  • Archive: Here you can create rules for the author pages of your website. 

  • Breadcrumbs: It lets you create your website’s breadcrumbs navigation 

  • RSS Feed: You can customize the settings for your blog page’s RSS Feed. 

  • Tools: Here you can import or export bulk SEO info and at once you can also make bulk modifications to your web pages. 

For more insights on using the Yoast SEO plugin for your WordPress website, get in touch with us.

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Parth Shah

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Parth Shah
Joined: January 16th, 2020
Articles Posted: 12

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