Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. It is a very intuitive product, and the free version offers a good range of tools to aid your SEO goals on a basic level.
What is the Yoast SEO plugin?
Yoast is a guidance tool to help you identify some SEO best practices; as well as ensure the meta data for social media and search engines is there and displaying correctly.
Social Media Card (Preview) Assistance
One of the best things about Yoast is how it helps with off-page SEO on Social Media. From ensuring your twitter card (preview) shows up correctly, to helping to get the chosen meta data on display with Facebook previews. It’s the kind of info / detail you don’t automatically think about until you want to share your content and it isn’t displaying properly.
Focus Keyphrase + Meta Data fields
By far the most utilised and most helpful fields in the Yoast plugin (which shows below your post and page editor) is the fields which allow you to add your intended focus keyphrase, and specify the meta data you would like search engines to preview. This helps Yoast advise you of any good habits regarding keywords to get in the habit of using.
One disclaimer though, while Yoast uses these fields to help guide you in your keyword usage; it is the search engine algorithms which choose what your article is indexed for and how it shows up in searches. Yoast just provides the fields and guidance.
SEO & Readability Traffic Light System
The Yoast traffic light system is super easy to understand for beginners, this is why we suggest this plugin if you are just starting out. You can easily see whether you are scoring well (green), ok but needs improvement (orange), or needs work (red). They also give you a list of best practice things that will help you reach ‘green’.
Obviously this isn’t the be-all and end-all of SEO – but it is helpful to get started.
Site Maps
Site maps are the background information that search engines read in order to get a better idea of what content your website holds. Yoast has a handy tool to create these for you. Any tool that can help search engines find and index your content is a good thing!
If you want expert SEO advice or services, contact us!
