How To Use Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin Like A Pro
How to use Yoast SEO WordPress plugin like a pro. SEO is a big part of the success of any website or blog. So having a reliable way to improve search engine rankings can be a game-changer.
If you’ve ever tried to optimize a website for search engines. Then you’re familiar with the task of building your content so that it’s easy for search engines to “read” and understand. This is an important part of the website optimization process. But the reality is that many people struggle to understand the basics of how search engines work. And what it takes to make your content stand out from the crowd. In this article, we’ll show you how to use the Yoast SEO plugin like a pro to make sure your pages are optimized for search engines.
I will teach you everything you need to know about Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, including its best features and how to make the most out of it.
create great content
The first thing to understand is that although Yoast can help you optimize your post for SEO. The most important thing will always be the content of the blog itself.
Great content is the lifeblood of a successful blog. So if you are going to post regularly. The most important thing you can do is make sure your content is engaging and offers value to your readers. It is important to note that great content does not mean high volume. If you are posting every day. You still have to offer great content, but the quantity will naturally increase over time. This is an area where many bloggers struggle. They either don’t publish at all because they don’t feel they have anything to say or they try to say too much. This often results in very mediocre posts.
Content doesn’t always mean writing an entire article or sharing a blog post. You can use content in a variety of different ways to help engage your audience and improve your blog’s presence. One thing you should keep in mind is that content is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your blog. Content that is helpful and useful is more likely to be shared with friends and social media followers. This can drive even more traffic. If you are able to create content that makes a difference. It is likely that you will attract a large number of visitors. If you are trying to get more people to read your blog, you might want to start with the basics. Start by answering common questions. Then you can expand your answers with other information and build your expertise as you go along.
Understand Keywords
When you are trying to get more traffic to your website, you must consider the words that you are using. You need to understand the meaning of keywords. Keywords are the words that people use to search for information on the Internet. If you are using the right keywords, you will be able to get more traffic to your website. There are some keywords that people often use when searching for information. The best keywords are usually the ones that people actually use. You should keep track of the keywords that your potential customers are using to find out what they are looking for. The more popular the keywords are, the better it is for you. You will have more traffic to your website if you have popular keywords.
However, the most popular keywords are also usually the hardest to rank for because many websites want to rank for that keyword. So if your website is new you need to find keywords that are relevant to you but also have low competition, these are usually long-tail keywords, keywords that are longer than normal and therefore less likely to be searched by people. For example, the keyword for this article is “how to use Yoast SEO WordPress”. This keyword should be much easier to rank for than for example Yoast, or Yoast WordPress because it is a much more precise search term that will be used far less often.
Find Your Niche
If you want to find your niche as a content writer, you should be asking yourself if what you want to share will make a difference in people’s lives. You should be trying to help people in some way, either directly or indirectly. When people see your post, you want them to feel inspired or empowered to do something.
Also, you need to write content that is relevant to your website or business. Firstly because there is little point in writing a post on something that has no relevance to your website or business, duh! but also you need to convince your users and the search engines that your website is an authority or an expert in your chosen niche. This will get you more followers and will also indicate to the search engines that the quality of your articles is of high quality and relevance. This will increase your rank in search engines.
Develop Keyword-Driven Content
The first thing you should decide on when you are going to write an article is the keyword for it. Once you have the keyword, then the entire content of that article should be based on that keyword. Expand on it as much as possible and cover every conceivable aspect of it.
Use Yoast to optimise your article for SEO
I recommend that you first write out your article outside of WordPress and then when you are finally done copy and paste it over to WordPress.
The Readability analysis - how to use Yoast SEO WordPress
The readability analysis is pretty straight forward and maybe at the start when you first start writing articles you may struggle a bit. With practice, it will become easier and easier. The great thing about Yoast is that if you are unsure about anything that is not right. Basically, the button is not green but yellow or even worse red. You can just click on the link and it will explain it to you.
These are the basics you should keep in mind in order to achieve a great reading analysis.
- Keep your language simple and avoid complicated words. Your article should be easy to understand for everyone.
- Make your sentences short, less than 20 words are prefered.
- Also, keep your paragraphs short.
- Break up your text with plenty of subheadings.
Why write like this you may wonder. The answer is pretty simple. To make the article as easy as possible to understand and for people to be able to skip read to sections that are interested about.
The SEO analysis - how to use Yoast SEO WordPress
The SEO analysis is in a similar format as the reading one. However, there are a lot more fields and if you are not familiar with SEO can look quite daunting. However, don´t worry about it too much. It is not super complicated and with time you will get used to it.
In fact, it all makes perfectly good sense for the most part. Let´s go through them one by one.
single h1 title
In an article, there should always be only one H1 title. This is because the H1 title is the title that search engines recognise as the article’s title. So if you were to put in many different H1 titles the search engines would get confused about what your article is about. You will notice that I have a red mark there. That is because I use Elementor and by default, Elementor makes an H1 title every time a page is created, however, it does not show it. That is why I have a duplicate H1 title.
outbound links
Outbound links are links in your article that go to some other web page other than your website. For example, in this article, I have a link to Yoast. This is good because it tells search engines more information about your article and what it is about. It is also a benefit to you to link to high authority websites.
Image keyphrase
Search engines cannot “see” images on your website, they have no eyes. Therefore on the alt attributes of the images, you have in your article add your keyphrase so the Search engines can understand what the images are about.
Images
Including plenty of images in your article will help break up the wall of text and users like images. So they are likely to stay longer and read more of your article.
internal links
Internal links are links in the article going to other articles or pages on your website. This is great because the user may well go and have a look at other articles or pages on your website. This means the user will stay longer on your website. For search engines how long users stay on your website is a ranking factor. The longer they stay the better your rank will be because search engines will see users are enjoying your website and staying there a long time.
keyphrase in introduction
Put your keyphrase in the first paragraph of your article. this will show search engines that the keyphrase is very important!
keyphrase length
A keyphrase length has to be a certain length so that when it shows up on Google results it will not be too short or too long. Too short and you are wasting valuable real estate. Too long and the whole keyphrase will not be shown.
keyphrase density
Depending on the length of your article you should put in your keyphrase at how many times Yoast recommends. In my case 6 times. Go over that and you might be guilty of “keyword stuffing” which search engines do not like.
keyphrase in meta description
Always a good idea to add your keyphrase in the meta description. Again it shows search engines that you are genuinely writing about this keyphrase.
previously used keyphrase
Every article on your website should have a unique keyphrase. This is because of you write two or more articles with the same keyphrase, you are essentially fighting yourself. Search engines will just choose one of the articles to show in their search results.
keyphrase in h2 and h3 headings
Try of you can to include your keyphrase in some of your titles. It looks good for the search engines as it gives your keyphrase more importance.
text length
How long an article shows search engines how detailed the article is. Therefore the longer the better. However only write things that are relevant, don´t try to pad the article with irrelevant things. Users will not like this and will quickly stop reading your article.
conclusion - how to use Yoast SEO WordPress
I love the Yoast plugin because it is so user friendly and shows you exactly what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong in a very detailed way. I remember when I was first starting out and didn´t really understand or know much about SEO. But using this plugin actually helped me understand a lot about SEO. SEO has a lot of common sense in it, so it´s very easy to understand once you get used to it.
