Do you have a WordPress website and know the meaning of SEO? There is a high possibility that you have already installed the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin is quite a handful, and hence not all users take full advantage of what it has to offer. Some people are just satisfied with what the free plan offers because it has so much in store. Here are some of the features that you will get on the Yoast SEO plugin.
Generates XML Sitemaps
SEO cannot succeed unless you have a proper organization in place. An integral part of this process is the XML site map. Once you install the Yoast SEO, it auto-generates one and updates it consistently whenever you create new content. It is easy to change the XML settings by clicking on the “XML Sitemaps” in the WordPress admin dashboard.
Submit XML Sitemaps to Search Engines
The other terminology for this capability is pinging. In this case, Yoast SEO sends the updated sitemaps to Bing and Google automatically. The reason for this is that it helps search engines to add new content quickly. It also keeps the other indexed content pieces up-to-date in case you change them. You can also select to ping Ask.com and Yahoo when you post a new content piece. To do this, you just need to visit the XML sitemap option.
Allows Users to Create Custom Meta Description/Header
Headlines that make perfect email subjects’ lines for subscribers always make terrible headlines for SEO purposes. The Yoast plugin allows you to only write two headlines, one for the search engine and the other for people. You also need to add a custom meta description for your content.
It will help you to target the right keywords for your content. You will also hand-craft an enticing description to make more people choose your pages while browsing the search results. You will access both of them directly in the SEO box under the page/post editor.
Check Focus Keywords
You can quickly and easily check that you are not going over or under the board with keyword density. It also reminds you that you need to fix things that affect your on-page SEO like slugs, post/page URLs, etc. It is an amazing overall reminder that will keep you on track on each post. You enter the focus keyword in the SEO box, and it will pop up everything you want to see.
Easily Adding Page Redirects
If you update a page or post on your site, but the old one still receives most of the traffic, you need to add a simple redirect link to your new version. It will indirectly help your SEO as it will give your visitors clearer, better, and more up-to-date information. It can result in more user engagement and sharing of your content.
Add Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs demonstrate the organization of your website visually. It also demonstrates the specific area of the website that you are visiting currently. Breadcrumbs help visitors to navigate through your website. It also helps Google figure out how or if a website is related to a specific keyword or topic.
To enable these breadcrumbs, you need to go to the internal linking options. You have so much freedom to do editing, but it is advisable to keep it simple and nice. It should be understandable to both bots and people alike.
Change Permalinks
You can access several different functions under the permalink options that are highly useful to any website. You can manage the slug or URL for pages or posts from here. The function helps make up for slightly wrong links to your posts from other websites or your own pages.
If someone puts in a number accidentally or an excessive thing at the URL page, it will turn back automatically into the correct/clean URL. If you are using Yoast WooCommerce or any other e-Commerce plugin, you shouldn’t activate this even if you discover several ugly links on your pages. The same case applies if you use URL campaign tags to track sales origin.
Remove Stop Words from Slugs Automatically
This function, as the name suggests, removes stop words from the slugs. Thus, even if you do not type in a particular slug for each post, it will automatically remove the stop words. Google recommends you to keep them out of the URL because they don’t provide any meaning. It is easy to forget such little things; hence it is good to keep it activated.
Bulk Edit Descriptions/Titles
You can create some of your popular pages and posts before installing this plugin. It can be time-consuming to go in and edit one page after another. Yoast plugin as a bulk description and bulk title editor. It allows you to mass edit descriptions and titles of your older pages and posts with a lot of ease.
If you have too extensive backlog content, you may need three people working full-time to work on every content piece. Therefore, it is a good idea to only fix the high priority pages.
Hide Specific Pages/Posts from Search Engines
You will not want to hide the whole website from the search engines. However, there comes a time when you will find it necessary to hide some pages from the search engines. For instance, you could be running a special promotion for email subscribers.
You may create a quick page that has further details. You will not want Google to show this page in the search results. With Yoast SEO, you can choose to hide any page or post easily from the WYSIWYG content editor. The robots will listen to your commands, and only individuals who have a direct link will find the page.
If you are the main admin for your website, it’s wise to disable the other admins/authors’ advanced options. If not, you may risk having another person redirect some of your key pages to your website somewhere else. He can also spitefully turn your hits in Google to non-index. It is one of the most important things to note in this Yoast SEO Plugin Review.
Paragraph Structure
Yoast analyzes your paragraph structure to help you deliver better content. It makes sure the paragraphs aren’t too long, there are transition words, and sentences are short. It helps an average visitor to understand your content better.
If not, you can lose them as you try to express your points in long jargon. If consumers understand your material, they are more likely to turn into adamant fans or purchase. Thus, paragraph structure is one of the key features of Yoast SEO.
Keyword Density
The keyword density should not be too high for good SEO. It will make Google and other search engines rank your post poorly. Search engines want content that is not saturated with keywords for it to provide quality.
Yoast SEO Plugin shows how often you use keywords in your content. It makes sure that you don’t feel your content with too few or too many keywords. It is one of the key features that make our Yoast SEO Plugin Review.
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
This feature is also critical in this Yoast SEO Review. If your content reads easier, it will have more frequent visits and higher retention rates. The WordPress Yoast SEO plugin analyzes your sentences’ structure to ensure that they are easy to use.
Therefore, your readers will have an easy time absorbing your material. The most important thing is to engage your audience. Yoast is an SEO tool that will help you deliver the best content to readers.
Meta Descriptions
Google does not pay so much attention to metadata as it used to do in the past. However, meta descriptions still have an important role to play in the SEO world. It is the little text snippet that shows in your search engine link that will attract visitors.
Yoast SEO will allow you to create your own meta description and show whether it is optimized. If your content is perfect, this plugin will use a color bar to display a green line. A meta description is a point that we cannot leave out in our Yoast SEO review.
Link Support
Whether you are using external or internal links, Yoast SEO will help you to monitor this. It is a handy feature when you think about the ‘link juice’ of your web content. It is when your posts share authority with the other contents on your website.
It is also of great benefit to give your visitors links to get additional relevant information. Yoast SEO determines whether you have enough links and if you are using the ‘No Follow’ tag or not.
Prior Use of Keywords
Most SEO strategies do focus on a keyword that is different for each post that you create. It helps the pages rank high in the search engine results without competing for the same slot. Yoast SEO remembers all the keywords you have used in the past and will tell you if you have utilized one before. If not, you may inadvertently utilize money in marketing one of your webpages against another.
Using keywords in Subheadings
Subheadings id the other facet that search engines like Google pay less attention to. However, this still plays a role when it comes to crawling your posts to make them relevant. Yoast SEO will check your subheadings and tell you if the keyword is available or missing. SEO experts believe that it is ideal for readers and the search engine to insert the subheading keyword.
Permalink Cleanups
When you keep permalinks tidy, you will help people to find your content. WordPress has the ability to modify permalinks by itself, but Yoast SEO gives you higher control. For instance, Yoast removes stop words from the URL. It helps to keep the links short and more identifiable within the search engine.
Social Sharing
Yoast WordPress SEO also has an inbuilt ability for sharing particular information on social media. Even though you can still share the posts without such changes, you can still create specific descriptions and add different Twitter and Facebook imagery. It gives your posts more customization that proves to be highly beneficial as you engage your audience.
Time-Saving
The other thing to learn from this Yoast SEO review is that its premium version is a time saver. SEO is a continuous process that will never come to an end. There are always more fixes to make, better content to write, and more work to do.
Yoast is the best SEO for WordPress that will be of great assistance to you. Yoast is not an SEO tool that you set and forget about it. You need to work on it to build the structure of your website or improve your content. In the free version, you will be doing some of the work by yourself. However, Yoast SEO premium has so many tools that will help you save a lot of time.
Easy to Maintain Your Website
If site maintenance is turning out to be a day job, you may require some assistance. Premium Yoast SEO makes it easy to maintain your website. The redirect manager is among those tools that make it very easy to work on your website.
When you make changes to URLs or pages, the tool will add a redirect for you. You only need to say where the new URL should lead. The redirect manager will help you to fix the 404 errors within no time. Most Yoast premium users say that the redirect manager is the best feature in this SEO tool.
Great Site Structure
A quick route to success is building a solid site structure. If your content is easily accessible to search engines and users, it helps both of them to make sense of your website. Yoast SEO premium has several tools that will help you create relevant links. This will build a rock-solid foundation for the structure of your website.
It has internal linking suggestions that will suggest relevant content automatically as you write a new one. Therefore, there is no need to remember all the pages and posts.
Advanced Language Analysis
This feature is critical because it makes your writing more natural. Yoast SEO is famous for readability analysis and SEO, i.e., the green bullets. The feedback from this analysis helps in producing great content pieces that conform to several SEO best practices. It works splendidly, but Yoast SEO Premium makes it more flexible and natural.
Premium has a smart feature that is known as word forms support. It is an innovative language analysis that focuses on the exact match of the keyword phrase that you enter. It also looks at all the grammatical forms of the respective word.
For instance, if you use the term ‘decoration,’ the word forms you find are like ‘decorates’ and ‘decorated. It is the same thing how Google does it, and the words don’t necessarily need to be of the same order.
Use Related Key Phrases and Synonyms in the Text
Context is critical in SEO, and search engines become smarter each day. They use the context that has the keyword to establish what a text is about. Therefore, related terms and synonyms are now more important than ever before.
The free version of Yoast SEO allows you to add one focus key phrase. Yoast SEO plugin utilizes this feature to help in optimizing your post. Yoast SEO has so many tricks up its sleeve, which makes it a smart solution.
You can add several key phrases and synonyms to your post. You can use this to make your content come to life. The premium analysis will make sure that you use the related key phrases and synonyms in your post correctly. Isn’t that awesome?
You may also utilize SEMrush integration to gather trends and data about your related key phrases. You can add the related key phrases that SEM uncovers to your post with just a single click of the mouse.
Optimize Posts Before Publishing on Social Media
Social preview is among the most popular SEO tools for Yoast premium. The previews will allow you to see how your post will look like when you share it on social media. Examples of these platforms are Facebook and Twitter.
It makes it much easier to fine-tune its appearance and ensure that the posts reach full potential on social media. Zapier integration in premium also allows you to automate post publishing to your choice’s social media platform.
Yoast Academy
Yoast SEO review also shows that the premium version gives you free access to the Yoast SEO academy. Isn’t this a great deal of deed? It is the leading WordPress SEO plugin that will help you to perform well in the search engines. It also provides several instructional material hours.
Signing up to Yoast SEO premium will give you access to more than 15 SEO courses. You will learn some SEO-related topics to include Structured data, keyword research, SEO copywriting, Yoast SEO, etc.
Internal Linking
The free Yoast SEO plugin has so many features that it offers to the users. However, the premium version takes things to the next level. With the Internal linking suggestions feature, you will organize your blog in a very cohesive manner.
It will also make sure that linking equity passes on to the other posts. This feature will save you a lot of time because the plugin will suggest links as you continue writing. The internal linking feature becomes more valuable as your site continues to grow.
