We get asked this question all the time – “What’s the easiest way to get started with search engine optimization (SEO) for WordPress websites?” Whether you would like our marketing team to help with content development or you will be writing content yourself, our favorite tool is the Yoast SEO plugin. All our websites include Yoast SEO free of charge, and is a great tool to tweak your existing content or to create new content optimized for search engines. Here we will run down some of the key features, and how it will help you write better content for your target audience.
Key Features of Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress
Focus Keyphrase
For each article or page on your WordPress site, its a good idea to have a single phrase in mind on which to focus your SEO efforts. The keyphrase tool will help make sure you’ve included the phrase in various parts of your page or post.
Snippet Preview
This will help you see your article just as it will appear in internet searches? Is your article title too long? Is your article description not attracting many clicks? The snippet preview tool can help you diagnose these issues and more.
Technical SEO checklist
Not sure what keyword density, outbound links, internal links or image alt attribues are? Yoast will help you optimize all the relevant technical details of your article to optimize the content for search engines.
Readability Analysis
This tool parses and scores the text on your page for things like sentence length, ease of reading, and paragraph length to ensure that your content is easy to read. Dial these in and your website visitors are sure to interact more positively with your website content.
We’ve gone over the basics of how to use the Yoast SEO plugin for search optimization for WordPress, but for more detailed information on how to use Yoast for your WordPress website, check our their great articles here.
Once you’ve used Yoast SEO to create great content on your site, its a great idea to setup rank tracking and website performance metrics to measure your results. Whether we’ve built your site or you have an existing site, we can help you setup reporting tools to see how your SEO efforts are paying off. Contact us to see how we can help!