Using Yoast SEO
You’ve got your website up and running. You’ve consulted some blogs or chatted to peers, and using Yoast SEO has been recommended – so you’ve installed the plugin. But what happens now? How can you help your site to rank in the Google search results? Read on to find out…
What is Yoast SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation – a practice which, basically, involves helping search engines to find and list your site in their results, then trying to boost those listings so they appear as high up the results as possible. Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps with the technical aspects that affect your performance in the rankings, and gives you feedback on the content of your pages, with suggestions for optimising it.
How to use Yoast SEO for your WordPress site
Our guide focuses on using Yoast SEO for WordPress sites. You can get started by accessing the back end of your WordPress website and finding the Yoast SEO configuration wizard at SEO > General > Dashboard. Depending on whether the website is about you or an organisation you’re representing, you’ll add the corresponding details to help with visibility in Google’s Knowledge Graph – which is the block of information on the right-hand side of the search results when you search for a business or individual.
Technical SEO
The technical side of SEO is something many site owners prefer not to involve themselves with. With that in mind, Yoast SEO has been deliberately designed to take care of several technical aspects in the background, leaving you to focus on content. The plugin does the following on your behalf:
- Helps search engines to understand your pages through structured data outputs
- Helps search engines find and index all your site’s pages by creating an XML sitemap
- Yoast SEO Premium automatically creates redirects when you move or delete content, preventing dead ends
At a glance information
Yoast SEO uses a traffic light system to give you an idea of how well optimised your content is. On the right hand side of your content editing box, in the Yoast SEO sidebar, red, orange and green bullets are displayed, giving feedback on four essential elements:
- The focus keyword or phrase
- The Readability analysis
- The SEO analysis
- The Google preview
Before publishing a post, check each of the scores for the above meets at least the minimum requirement. You can also optimise further if you wish.
Focus keyword
Keep your content focused by inputting the keyword you’d like to rank for in the box provided. Those with Yoast SEO Premium can also add related keywords and synonyms to take their SEO copywriting up to the next level.
Readability analysis
Look at this tab once you’ve written the first draft of your content. The colour of the bullet will tell you how readable your text is, and you can open the tab to view suggestions for improvement. Readability is crucial for SEO, but bear in mind that if your page necessarily involves some technical terms, it may not be possible to get some of the bullets green. That’s fine – simply try to optimise the overall readability as best you can.
SEO analysis
The SEO analysis determines how well your content is optimised for the keyword you’ve chosen in the ‘focus keyword’ box. Have you used it enough in the text? Is it part of your meta description, title, subheadings and image tags? Again, you can open the tab for more specific feedback and suggestions for improvement.
Google preview
This function gives you an idea of how your site could appear in search results. Here you can set the SEO title and meta description for your page, enticing readers to click the link.
Additional items
As mentioned, you should try to optimise all of the above before putting a page or post live. You will notice, however, that there are other elements you can optimise if you choose. You can improve your WordPress SEO by viewing and implementing the internal linking suggestions, adding Schema markup, and looking at social previews. All this will help you to ensure your content appears where you want it to.
The Yoast Dashboard
Should you wish to explore further options for search engine optimisation, you can take a look at the Yoast Dashboard. It’s more advanced, but will give you greater control over aspects such as how your titles are separated when they appear in search results listings. For example:
Image credit: Google search
Here you can see three types of separator have been used. You can select the one that suits you best.
You can also specify the setup for your SEO title on the dashboard. Typically, the page or post title would come first, followed by your company’s name, but this can be changed if you prefer.
Next steps
If you require further assistance with using Yoast SEO, or would like help optimising your website for the search engines, get in touch with Whitefish Marketing today. With years of experience in SEO and online marketing, we’re the ideal partner when it comes to boosting your rankings.
