A much sought-after plugin for WordPress websites, Yoast SEO, offers its clients some of the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices in the game. These practices are aimed at achieving completely indexed content for your website. The Yoast SEO plugin is responsible for handling the technical optimization of a website and offers further aid by optimizing the content of the website.
Once the Yoast SEO plugin has properly been set, it can be put to use for your on-page SEO optimization, especially your content. Most of the everyday optimization for websites is implemented through the Yoast SEO Meta Box, which can be found at the bottom of every webpage.
Meta Title and Description
One of the most crucial parts of your snippet is the meta title and description. Yoast will, by default, will get hold of an excerpt from the first paragraph of the post. However, this might not be the best option that you opt for. Thus, it is best that you create a custom title and description for your posts. The meta title and description that you create should be able to tell people what the article is trying to convey and then provide them with a good reason to click on your content. Incorporate a keyword-rich description that is relevant to your target audience. Make use of actionable words that encourage the readers to learn about the topic in more detail. Last but not the least, the meta title and description that you write must match the content you wish to publish.
Image Alt Text
Inserting alternative texts with the images that you use is one of the most fundamental principles of web accessibility. They are used to describe images to users with vision disabilities. By inserting image alt text, Yoast SEO makes it easier for a visually impaired person to derive the image that you use. From another perspective, there are search engine bots that crawl on the alt text to understand the images better. This gives you an additional benefit of providing a superior context of your image to the search engines. You just need to make sure that the alt texts that you insert can be naturally read for people.
Readability Analysis
Content is always king. That’s why it is important for you to optimize the content not only for the search engines but for people as well. At the end of the day, these people are the ones reading your content and it is based on the amount of time that they spend on your website that Google ultimately rates your content rank. Yoast’s readability analysis helps you create better content for readers. It monitors the post and grades its readability for humans.
Optimize Your Keywords
This particular feature found in Yoast 8.0, is known as Focus Keyword. It effectively analyses the content on the basis of your target keyword. Yoast tallies the keyword density, the total number of outbound and internal links, critical SEO factors as well as image optimization. Much like the readability analysis, it will provide you with feedback on how well is your content optimized based on your specific keyword. You also receive appropriate suggestions on things that you need to improve on. All that you need to do is insert your target keyword into the “focus keyword” box and then your article will be graded with red, orange, and green dots. You also have an additional option to include further keywords and LSI keywords to target.
Use Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content, also known as power pages or pillar content, represent the most vital aspects of your site. They are preferably explainer articles that you want to be ranked highest in the search engine ranking pages. Yoast lets you mark any posts that you want as your cornerstone content. This will let you track these posts or pages with ease and pay special attention to them. Also, you need to focus on the internal links that you select as cornerstone content. Yoast also provides you with a link suggestive tool in the premium version to inform you of a good linking opportunity.
Edit Posts for Social Media
The social media sharing tab lets you manually set how your content will appear, as when shared on Twitter and Facebook. You can also see a preview of how this content will look on the social media platforms via the premium version of Yoast SEO. In case the result that you see is up to your liking, you can always optimize it by editing the description, title as well as the image of your content to best suit the requirement of your readers.
Advanced Post Settings
Lastly, you have a tab for advanced settings that lets you make some minor and very intricate adjustments to each one of your posts. You can disable or enable the posts that appear on the search engine results, adjust the settings for meta robots, and mark your links as no-follow. This section is a very technical one so unless you have an in-depth knowledge of Yoast SEO it’s best not to attempt any changes.
Utilizing Yoast to its Full Potential
On-page SEO is vital because it lets search engines understand your content as well as your website to finally decide if it was relevant to the query of the searcher. With search engines becoming more sophisticated, the focus has greatly shifted towards relevance and the semantics in the search engine ranking pages. Yoast SEO makes the best use of the SEO functionalities offered by WordPress plugins to offer great on-page SEO capabilities to its clients.