The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin sports over 4.5 million-plus downloads and an average rating of 4.7-stars over 5. Yoast’s SEO WordPress is a comprehensive solution to drive your WordPress website toward a higher Google ranking by streamlining the site to increase the click-through rate and ranking. The plugin’s inbuilt Flesch Reading Ease scale tells whether or not your post is easy to read.
Yeast SEO allows adding SEO title, Meta Description, and Meta keywords to each post and page of your site. This ensures that Google approves and your post and website will be aptly ranked as per the click on and visitors. The SEO plugin also checks the keyword density in your content to check if that particular phrase has been used in the article heading, page title, post URL, content, and Meta description. After this assessment, it shows colored dots to tell users what’s lacking.
- Green dot – Google will approve
- Grey dot -No information available for Yoast SEO to judge
- Yellow or orange dot – Improvement required
- Red dot – Lot of issues
Yoast also offers the functionality of integrating the latest Facebook open graph, Sitemaps and ping search engines and metadata from Twitter in order to make the website more social.
Setting Up the Yoast SEO WordPress
- Once you have downloaded and installed the Yoast SEO, your work will come off easy and help you make the most out of your site’s SEO. You will be able to see the SEO option on the dashboard menu, where you are supposed to choose ‘General’. This will redirect you to a page that will show general settings options for SEO.
- Next, you will be required to input all info about your site and your business.
- The Webmaster Tools (aka Google Search Console) tab will then let you verify your Google Search Console or other Webmaster tools you’re planning to use with your site.
- Move down to the next one, Titles & Metas where you need to eliminate duplication which can otherwise result in messed up ranking.
- The sitemaps section requires you to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
Yoast SEO has proven to be a “replace all” plugin in the market and some of the most proficient sites such as SearchEngineLand, and The Next Web now. Here is a comprehensive guide to this plugin to help you understand better.
You might also want to read this one as an extension of this blog. How to choose the perfect focus keyword?