Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that will help your post get found on the search engines. This article will give you a taste of what it is and what it does.
TL;DR
- SEO Is Important for Blog Traffic
- A Yoast Is a Powerful SEO Tool
- It’s Stupid Simple. Anyone Can Use It
What Is SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, this means is that you are trying optimize your content in such a way so that sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines can easily find your content and understand what you’re trying to say.
Why Is SEO Relevant to Blogging?
Your content needs to be optimized so that it stands out from the hundreds of thousands of other blogs. You need the search engines recommending you over all the other content being produced so that your blog becomes and stays relevant.
If the search engines can easily understand what you’re writing about, they are more likely to recommend your content as an answer when they’re searching for a question.
When your content is suggested as an answer more, more humans are going to end up seeing your content. As more humans see your content, you will get more engagement in the form of comments ans shares. When you get more engagement, your website authority increases. When your website authority increases, and you get mentioned in media publications and receive powerful backlinks that firmly entrench you in Google’s top 10.
How Does Yoast SEO Work?
Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that reads the content you’ve written and gives you feedback on both how easy it was to read as well as how easy it will be found on search engines. Once it’s installed, Yoast will run automatically. First, you enter the keyword you want to be found for into Yoast. Then, Yoast will read your content. Once Yoast has read your content, it will give you an overall score like a traffic light that appears on the top of the screen. Something will be red if it is not easily read or searched, orange if it’s okay, and green if it’s optimized and ready to go.
Is Yoast SEO Easy To Use?
In a word, very. When looking at the feedback, there is a little eyeball next to each item. Simply click on the eyeball and it will highlight the sections of the post that are the problem areas.
All that is left to do now is change what you have written to something a little bit more Yoast friendly. If you changed your content correctly, the highlight will go away. Move on.
Just continue working until you have minimal highlights or no highlights at all. However, keep in mind that humans will ultimately be reading this. Do not sacrifice natural flow for search engine optimization. You ultimately still want to write for humans. If people are bouncing from your page because it’s awkwardly written, that tells the search engines that it’s bad content and your ranking will suffer as a result.
What Does Yoast Cost?
Yoast offers both a free and a paid plan. I have found that for the average blogger and the beginning marketer the Yoast free plan is sufficient. You get to optimize for one keyword per post. Paid plans offer the ability to optimize a post for multiple keywords.
Conclusion
To sum up, if you are a blogger or marketer, you want your content to be found, period. In order to have people find your content, you need to have your content optimized for the search engines. The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress offers that solution for free. After you have written your post, Yoast will read it for you and recommend suggestions to make it both more readable and more searchable. From there, you just have to fix the highlighted sections and when most of them are gone, you will be left with a perfectly optimized post. It couldn’t get more simple
