SEO is difficult. You have to pour hours into understanding how keyword research, meta descriptions, titles, and the readability of your site works. It can all be rather stressful. This is why many people, including SEO professionals, turn to tools that can help them.
Perhaps one of the most popular tools for doing this is the Yoast SEO plugin. We doubt there is a single successful WordPress site out there that doesn’t use it. It is that useful, and we use it for all of our client’s websites.
So, what is Yoast SEO? Why do you need it? Let’s explain.
What Is Yoast?
Yoast is a plugin for WordPress.
The job of Yoast is to make SEO work easier. It assists in the optimization of site content. It will allow you to check that keywords have been included the right number of times. It will ensure that your meta descriptions meet current standards. It will help to ensure that your page content is of a high enough quality to get ranked well on Google.
The bulk of what Yoast does will be accomplished automatically. You will need to put a little bit of effort in, but things aren’t as tough as you may think.
How Yoast Works
As Yoast is a WordPress plugin, it only takes a few seconds to install. Once it is activated, each time you make a new post on your site, Yoast will be there to assist. It will guide you through ensuring that your content is optimized for SEO.
Not only will Yoast help you rank your content, but it will also give you recommendations on how you can improve your content to ensure that it ranks even higher in the searches.
Yoast does such a good job that it is not uncommon for people to learn how SEO works. It doesn’t do everything related to SEO (only helps with the on-page stuff), but that is a good chunk of what SEO involves.
The Benefits Of Using Yoast
One of the great things about Yoast is that there is both a free and a paid version available. While the paid version does boast a few features that the free version doesn’t, even the free version of the plugin is perfectly serviceable.
Let’s walk you through the various features of Yoast, and while these may be beneficial to you.
Focus Keyphrase
When you do your keyword research, you will be working hard on building up a list of keywords. These are the key terms that you want your site to appear in the search engines when searched for. A good deal of the work that we do here will be focused on keywords.
Yoast will allow you to set a focus keyphrase, and it will analyze your page to ensure that your on-page SEO gives you an opportunity to rank for that particular keyphrase.
Google Preview
You need your site to look enticing in the search engines. Not only will it increase your ranking, but may encourage people to click. This means that you can edit the snippets on your page and preview how they look on Google. With just a couple of taps of your mouse and keyboard, you can quickly change the SEO title and meta description.
Readability
Yoast wants to ensure that your page is readable. While it is not going to be carrying out grammar or spell checks for you (get Grammarly for that!), it will let you know how easy the page is to read. This can have a huge impact on your search engine position, particularly if your goal is to target a general audience rather than professionals.
Social Media
Social media has become increasingly important when it comes to site ranking. If you have Yoast Premium, then you will be able to change how your site looks when shared on social media. This gives you a ton more control over what people are saying about your website, and this can lead to not only an increased position in the search engines but also more clicks via social media.
Why We Will Always Recommend SEO
As a site owner, you should know just how important it is to do your SEO properly. Even if you do not understand SEO, you need to know how to do certain things. Yoast makes this easy.
As you learn how SEO works through Yoast, you will instinctively make better posts. Posts that rank highly in the searches.
We believe everybody serious about getting their site ranked uses Yoast.
If you need an SEO team working on your site, reach out to us today.
