For any WordPress users, it critical to use the Yoast plugins. However, lots of people still get confuse. Here is a beginner’s guide on using the Yoast plugin.
This is for anyone who starts a WordPress blog and want a quick easy way to do their SEO. Then you will need to start using the Yoast Plugin.
Yoast is by far the best plugin on WordPress to do your SEO. Without it – your site will have difficult swimming against the huge tidal wave of sites and might easily get lost at sea. Basically it will drown and your site is likely never seen again. Well only in the eyes of Google, anyway.
So yes, getting Yoast plugin is important. Unfortunately, as with everything, there is a problem. While Yoast Plugins does everything and greatly help your SEO. It can be so overwhelming for any beginners. Every day I keep reading about more and more people getting confuse with this plugin.
Well no need to be confuse anymore, help is at hand. Here is a beginner’s guide on using the Yoast plugins. I will only be scratching the surface, for a more detailed guide, then you can find it here.
Installation:
Installing the Yoast plugin is fairly easy. You would install it like any other WordPress plugin by looking for the plugins tab on your WordPress dashboard. Then once you click on the plugins tab > Add News > using the search features type Yoast plugin > install > activate.
After it’s installed, first go to the Yoast tab (SEO) that is now on your dashboard. Click on it dashboard mini tab. And then click on General, as highlighted in red.
The Yoast plugin has done a basic good job with creating defaults setting that will work for your site. However, you still need to customize a few things. While on the Yoast plugin (SEO) dashboard look for a few of these things:
Features: This is where you can enable/disable certain features for your Yoast plugin. My advice would be to have a play around and to see how much features you want.
Your Info: This is where you put in your website name and whether you are a company or a person.
Webmaster Tools: This is where your put in your Bing and Google Analytic codes. I never got this to work successfully so I tended to ignore this.
The Traffic Lights System:
Now let look at Yoast plugin traffic lights system. You will be using this on all your blog posts in order to optimize your content for search engines.
On every blog entry, Yoast plugin will place a “meta box” below the main box in WordPress. Go to Posts > Add New and you will see what I mean.
This meta box is the key that will unlock all your SEO. Here’s what it all means.
The top line in bold is your title tag.
The second line is your URL slug.
The third line is meta description.
Now you understand what each line does, let look at what you need to do.
First, enter the ‘focus keyword’ for the blog post. For example, if you’re writing about a little black dress, your focus keywords would be ‘a little black dress’. This is also where your keywords research comes in.
Now write your blog post on a little black dress. The Yoast plugin will then analyze the written content of the blog post and provide a real-time traffic-light style system, that will tell you how well your post is going to be in search engines. Let look at the example:
This relates to this blog post.
As you can see, I’m mostly green but have a few orange lights; for example, I have:
- No Outbound links.
- The SEO title is too short.
- The focus keywords use a stop words.
- The focus keywords aren’t in the URL.
The orange lights are merely suggestion and any changes are not as important as the red light.
Ultimately you will be aiming to get all green. If you can get nearly all green and two oranges, then you have done a good job. The higher the green – the more it will help your SEO.
Readability:
This little tab ensure your blog post is readable and it will score highly on search engine. It also works on a traffic lights system. It does offer suggestion on how to improve the writing to make it more SEO friendly. Do be aware that this is still relatively a new feature of Yoast plugin and can be a little buggy. Don’t get upset if you can’t get any green lights.
Publish:
Just before you hit publish on your new blog post, you will see your Yoast plugin result. It will tell you if you are green or orange. Sometime this can be helpful to look at and make any changes before you hit publish.
(in the picture example, it showing ‘update’ that because I have already published the post.)
Open discussion:
I will leave it here, as I said it’s a beginner guide on Yoast plugin. If you have any questions, then feel free to ask.
