Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to do On-page SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO WordPress Plugins. It makes it easy to add Keywords and Meta Descriptions to your website. It helps you think about the Titles and Subtitles throughout your posts and how your content is structured. Yoast SEO also has such a large collection of resources helping you learn how to use the tool and get better at On-page SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. What is a Search Engine you may ask?

Well most of you would use Google as your search engine. Every time you go to ask Google a question you are typing your questions into Google’s search engine.  Other search engines include Bing, Yahoo and Baidu which is a Chinese search engine that is follows China’s strict censorship rules, but Google is by far the biggest player with 75% of the market.

So what does it mean to optimise search engines?  It basically means doing certain activities that help increase the rank of your website so that when people type in a question such as “best donut in Australia”, it will come up with your amazing donut store on the first page. Stats show that page one of google search results receive 95% of web traffic with subsequent pages receiving 5% or less, so ultimately you want to be on the first page of search result.  However like anything in life , nothing happens over night and it can take a while for you to get to page one especially if you are in a highly competitive landscape. So it’s important to be consistent with doing these activities to help you move your rank up and keep your rank up

What are SEO Activities?

So as I said SEO is just doing certain activities which helps increase your rank in Google Search Results. What are some of those activities – Five star jumps every morning!! Anyone?

Blogging – relevant, valuable content for your customers or potential customers

Adding your business to “Google My Business” which is a great free tool Google has given us to add our business address so you can be located on Google Maps and have a nice icon pointing to you. You can also add post’s like Facebook, get reviews, add opening hours and much more. Why is this tool so awesome? Well Google likes to know everything about everything and by you providing that information to google can better serve up search results to its customer. Cause remember Google is wanting to provide the most relevant and up to date content for it’suser who is searching in it search engine so if you are providing relevant content you are helping Google.

Adding Good Titles and Sub titles that makes it easy for Google to understand what you page and blog posts and social media post are all about and that are what your potential customers are searching for

Social Media, creating valuable content and sharing it on your socials, knowing which socials your customer is using, FB, Youtube, Instagram Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin and making sure you are active on these.

Getting Review from customers and getting them to add to Google my Business, Facebook, Website etc

Networking – this is a good one and one that is overlooked. Getting out and meeting people, running workshops, running information sessions etc. Meeting people online, join groups of interests that potential customers would be in and share your skills knowledge with that community and support those within that community.

Adding Keywords and Meta Descriptions to your website which is where Yoast SEO comes into play.

Adding your website to Google Search Console so Google knows you exist and can start crawling your site to better understand it.

Making sure your site is secure with an SSL certificate which gives your visitors protection. This is a requirement to rank higher in Google.

Making Site mobile friendly is also a must for Google because they want their users to have the best experience so making sure your site is mobile responsive is super important.

Ok so that is a lot of activites, but they all add up to helping increase your rank in Google.

You can also do paid search marketing using Google Adwords, but there is no point in creating ads and paying money until you have something of value for you customer in the form of content and once you stop paying for those ads if you don’t have content then you will just fall in rank.

What is Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO  is one of the best SEO WordPress Plugins that makes it easy to add on-page SEO such as Keywords/Keyphrase and Meta Descriptions. It helps you think more about the titles and sub-titles of your posts and pages and how your content is structured. Yoast SEO also has such a large collection of resources, helping you learn how to use the tool and get better at on-page SEO

What are Keywords or Keyphrase?

They are words that define what your content is all about and they are the words that customers enter into search engines such as Google search to find what they are looking for.   So you want your keywords to be relevant to what people are searching for so there is a better chance they will find you. For example, I’m turning this into a Blog post so I would use the Keyword “Yoast SEO”. So I would use these keywords throughout my content and make sure the post is very relevant to this topic and valuable to my readers. Yoast SEO as a keyword would be considered a “short tail” or “head” term, meaning 1-2 words and would be very hard to compete for traffic. So there is another way you can do keywords which are called ‘long tail’ keywords. What are these? Long tail keywords are phrases made up of 3-5 words. They tend to have less traffic because they are not as popular as the head terms or short tail keywords but it also means you are more likely to be found as your not competing with the head terms.

How to choose a good Keyword?

This is all about understanding your customer and their needs. Google suggest is a great addition to the search engine that can help you figure out good keyphrases. Learn more about Keywords

What are Meta Descriptions?

These are a snippet of up to 155 words which summarizes your page or blog post content. This short snippet is what will be shown on the search results. Make sure you add the keyword into the meta description because Google would be more likely to show it is search results.  If you do not write a meta description for each page and post, Google will pull text from the content of the page, so it’s important to write your own so that it’s more appealing for your customers who are searching on Google. See example below how your meta description appears on Google Search Results page

Install and set up Yoast SEO

So lets go in and try out Yoast SEO tool. Refer to video at top to follow along or continue reading.

If you don’t already you can add the Yoast SEO plugin via WordPress repository. Login to your WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Add New > Search for “Yoast SEO” > Install and Activate

Setting up Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO makes it very easy to set up by giving you a configuration wizard. Go to WordPres Dashboard > Y SEO tab > General > then find the Configuration wizard as shown in image below. If this does not show up then click the save button and reload the page it may take some time to show this box. So all you need to do is open up the configuration wizard and follow the prompts adding all of the important information. Watch video at top of blog to follow through.

Add website to Google Search Console

You will need to add your website to Google Search Console and then add the verification code into the Webmasters tool. You can follow this Blog from Yoast on how to do this. You just need to verify ownership of your website and then add the verification code into the Webmaster Tool Tab in Yoast SEO General area.

Lets go into the Features Tab and make sure everything is turned on.

What is “Cornerstone”? Your evergreen content, the most important articles on your site and the ones you want to rank the highest for. They are generally the longest posts that branch off to others posts 

Site map this is a great feature and Yoast will create a site map which maps out your important pages on your website making it easier for Google to navigate your site

Yoast SEO On-Page tool

Now we can go in and add Keywords and Meta Descriptions to our blog post, products and pages by using the on-page Yoast SEO tool.

Go to one of your blog posts or pages and scroll down untill you see the Yoast SEO tool

Edit the snippet

Click on the “Edit Snippet” button and add your title, slug and meta description making sure you add an appealing snippet so that it will draw your customer to your page to want to learn more. Remember this is what Google will show on the Search Results page when someone is looking for this particular topic.  You want the line to be green, it will turn orange or red when your title or meta description is too long or too short.

Add a Focus Keyphrase

Click on Focus Keyphrase and add the keywords that you want to rank high for and that you have throughout your blog content. The Yoast tool happy face will turn green if these keywords are used throughout the blog post.

Readability Analysis

The Yoast SEO tool will show you where you need to improve your content by showing red lights. The aim is to try and get green lights. Below you can see where I need to improve in the red lights and where I have done well. So I can go back into my blog post content and add more Subheadings, shorten my paragraph lengths and sentence lengths to improve the readability on the blog post, making it easy for my website visitor to read the content and get value from it.

Analysis results

The Yoast SEO tool will show you where you need to improve on the content you have written such as needing to add the Keyphrase more throughout the post. Here you can see it’s only 0.1% which is way to low, so I will go back into my blog post and add the keyphrase “How to set up Yoast SEO” more to increase that density. It will go green when I have added it enough. I think roughly 2% is good. It will also go red if the keyphrase is too dense, so added too many times and this will suggest the post is spammy and not valuable for the visitor.

Have fun playing the Green light Yoast game and let me know how you go and if you have any tips or tricks you use to increase your rank in Google

See you next time lovely humans

Leisa