I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the main reason are the themes and plugins. I’m all for making my life easier and giving off the impression that I have an eye for good web design and know what the heck I’m doing.
I think of my plugins like sports fanatics conjure up their all-time favorite dream team. Let’s use basketball as example. You want plugins that range from a powerhouse in defense/security to a point-guard plugin helps you handle or “manage” the website. For this post, I’ll highlight a plugin that is definitely a franchise player—Yoast SEO Plugin.
What is Yoast SEO?
Before I sing the praises of this plugin, let’s dig a bit into SEO or search engine optimization. In layman’s terms it helps your website get found, indexed and achieve optimal positioning on search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google. It’s an unpaid method, but requires implementing several tactics to impact different forms of searches including images, local search, video, news and more. Okay, enough of the boring nerd stuff. Not everyone is a SEO expert and Yoast SEO brings the wealth to everyone. Below are just a few feature highlights of the plugin that I find helpful.
Post Titles and Meta Descriptions
Creating relevant and then catchy titles are important. But if you can do that PLUS include your focus keyword, i.e. a keyword phrase you want to be ranked for, well, then you’re cooking with fire, grease, wood and all that jazz.
Focus Keyword: “Yoast SEO Plugin”
This is a screenshot of this blog post. As you can see, Yoast highlights the important area of your content and will scan to see if you’ve used the focus keywords.
Just choose a keyword and make sure it’s relevant and has a good search volume and is a popular keyword. Great tools to use are Google Keyword planner tools and Google Trends.
After you’ve ensured you have selected the right keyword and have scanned the content, click on the “Edit snippet” section so that you can change the title, slug and meta description. This is the snippet someone will see on search engines. This is important to drive clicks and this is the opportunity to help users determine if the content on the website is relevant to what they are searching for. You can also scan the helpful checklist to ensure
The tools above are from the basic, but the premium Yoast plugins has more robust features. Check out the plugin and tell me what you think!
