If you are familiar with the terminology circulating around the search engine optimization world, you’ll realize that a term always hovers around the central idea of search engine optimization techniques in WordPress- known as Yoast SEO. This article will help you to understand what Yoast is, and how you can use Yoast SEO to boost your web page’s rankings.
As with countless other search optimization techniques, there are numerous resources that one can pick in order to gain a better understanding of it. However, different resources have their plus points and their pitfalls. We will compile the most reputable information on Yoast to make your life easier.
Firstly, what is Yoast?
Yoast is a Netherlands-based search optimization company that specializes in search engine optimization for WordPress users. It has gain a high ranking amongst search engine optimization software for blogging purposes, and its developers account for a considerable amount of WordPress users.
Yoast has chosen to make WordPress-related SEO a part of their main objectives as WordPress is a convenient, accessible platform for bloggers. This makes it easy for anyone to do content-specific keyword marketing for their website through blog posts.
Moreover, WordPress uses specific algorithms that already enables your content to gain better publicity and higher Search Engine Response Page (SERP) index rankings. It ensures that your content is optimization friendly without too much effort. However, all of this is not enough for your to gain the highest rankings on SERPs.
This is the area of SEO that deals with Yoast SEO, which can help propel your WordPress rankings to search to the front of every search engine response page.
How does Yoast help SEO marketing?
Yoast focuses on several factors of search engine optimization that can make marketing methods more effective. They are:
#1 Automated Optimization
Yoast is meant to complement WordPress’ original search engine optimization techniques. It naturally extends the reach of WordPress’ algorithm. Yoast helps to optimize meta tags and extended link elements that search engines’ web crawlers index before ranking each result for readers.
Moreover, it will help to remind you to add permalinks to your website if it is not optimized for search engine optimization yet. It also provides a safeguard for you to display specific pages of your website to search engines and hide certain pages, if you would like to remove unsavory SERP results.
#2 Page Analysis and Writing Aids
Yoast also utilizes a plug-in that pops up (in the style of Grammarly) while you are writing new content on your blog. The plug-in monitors your work consistently and provides suggestions in order to improve and optimize your content. The plugin is programmed to let you know if your keyword usage is properly done, as well as provide a page word count.
It also has suggestions about optimizing keywords in headlines, and also notify you of writing elements and sentence structure that may make your article more structured and positioned on search engine results pages. Long sentences may not be advised to use with this service as Yoast’s plug-in will advise you to shorten them. It also shows which sentences should be broken down, being fairly easy to follow.
After you have chosen on a headline and a tagline, the Yoast plug-in will provide you with a preview of your potential search engine response page results. Hence before publishing your content, you will be able to forsee what the outcome will be. This is a unique and important SEO tool that can help you to know what page your website is on, and whether your website is truly SEO-friendly.
It gives you increased canonical furnishing to your website’s content, making sure that it fits a taxonomy for XML sitemaps to categorize your content.
#3 Emphasis on XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps are useful for directing web crawlers into knowing which content to index on search engine pages. Without it, web crawlers cannot create a semantic structure to classify your content within your website, making your potential search engine response page results potentially messier and not SEO-friendly.
All it takes with Yoast’s SEO plugin is one simple button to generate an XML sitemap for the entirety of your website. This will ensure that web crawlers of large search engine giants, such as Google, index your website accurately. It can also allow you to obtain verified Google authorship for your content and your website.
These sitemaps also support image indexing, as well as more advanced control such as controlling the removal of content, pages, post types or a structure/taxonomy for your website in a sitemap. It also updates search engine indexes immediately after your website is tweaked and published, so that you do not risk having outdated content indexed. An option of adding an RSS footer and header feed to your website is also available under the sitemap indexing.
Without an XML sitemap, you risk having different tabs of your website ranked as one whole entity instead of separate pages as it is formatted to be. This will confuse readers and greatly reduce readership towards your web page, as your content will appear incomprehensible.
#4 Social Integration
Besides utilizing on-page search engine optimization marketing methods, Yoast’s SEO plug-in tool also emphasizes social media use as a form of off-page SEO marketing. Websites lack the potential to be spread around and have an increased viewership if it is not visible to social circles.
Yoast has intelligently embedded settings to optimize your blog post for popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that your content garners a high bounce back rate in your web page’s links, and also so that it ranks higher on search engine response page indexes.
Its form of social integration also uses ‘OpenGraph’ meta-data that allows you to choose and find a preview for Facebook posts, such as features like an accurate title, description and image for posting. It also allows the addition of Twitter cards that do branch into Twitter SEO marketing for extra off-page SEO marketing hits. It also branches into Pinterest, as well as Google+ SEO marketing.
#5 Embedded Search Console
Yoast’s SEO plug-in for WordPress also comes with a Search Console plug in. It is linked to Google’s Webmaster Tools, as you can connect your WordPress website to the webmaster tool website. The plug-in will then verify your website through a https connection, by getting a Google Authorization Code.
After successful verification, you will be diverted to the search console for further authorization of your website. These extra security measures put in by the plug-in is to ensure that your content does not have corrupted data in it.
Once you have authorized your website, you will be able to find crawl errors to your website and fix them by putting up redirect links and code to it. This will fix any potential 404 Errors related to the accessibility of your website, making it more user friendly and accessible.
This sums up the main features of Yoast’s SEO plug-in. If you are interested in venturing out to SEO based on WordPress, you should definitely integrate Yoast into your marketing methods.
Keep optimizing!