WP Yoast SEO - Ultimate SEO Plugin That You Must Use in 2021
Making your website ranks well in search engines requires you to do SEO. You can easily optimize your website and content using an SEO plugin. In this post, we will review the #1 SEO plugin for WordPress, WP Yoast SEO.
What Is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. This plugin improves your website’s rankings on search engines, by helping you optimize your site’s content and keywords. It also comes with various important features for on-page SEO.
Founded by Joost de Valk in 2010, Yoast SEO has helped more than 12 million websites on WordPress. It’s probably the must-have SEO plugin for every WordPress site, as it provides its services generously for free. Besides, it also has a premium version for in-depth service and tutor classes about SEO.
As an SEO plugin, Yoast SEO helps your site perform better in search engines by providing a range of features to improve your content. Not only that, but it also comes with an impressive Schema structured data implementation and structured data for your site so Google can understand it instantly. Moreover, it provides additional tools such as a redirect manager and internal linking suggestions.
What Does Yoast SEO Do?
Yoast SEO works to improve your website’s ranking on search engines by doing several things, including:
Optimize your content for search engines
After you create content for your website, Yoast SEO will optimize it using content SEO analyses. This feature determines how your content scores on different ranking factors, including the number of keyphrases used, the length of your text, and internal linking. In addition to that, you can insert a focus keyphrase to help your content ranking.
Enhances the readability of your content
Besides content SEO, Yoast SEO also optimizes your content for user readability. This plugin will help you in determining the best number of words in a subheading, the use of passive voice, the number of transition words, the use of passive voice, your sentence and paragraph lengths, and more.
Preview your content on search engines
Yoast SEO gives you a snippet preview of the way your post appears from the search engine. Also, it will give suggestions to your posts titles and let you know whether they are too short or long. It also gives you an option to add a meta description of your post.
Auto-generating XML Sitemap
Your sitemap will be automatically added to your site without much effort. This way, webmasters can easily inform search engines concerning pages on their sites that are available to them for crawling. All that you will need to do is to enable it on your site.
Customize Twitter & Facebook Post Sharing Snippets
With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can write a different description and title with an engaging picture for both Twitter and Facebook shares.
Verify search engine webmaster
Yoast SEO offers a feature where you can put in your verification meta tags offered through the big search engines. With this, you can effortlessly verify yourself as the owner of the blog without any coding.
Detect website indexable issues
Yoast SEO plugin is automatically monitoring your website and makes checks for any indexable issues through the use of the OnPage.org integration. After the issues are found, it will notify you via the dashboard so that you can address them in a timely manner prior to undergoing loss of search engine traffic loss.
Define website cornerstone content
A cornerstone content comprises of those articles that you are most proud of in your website. These are the type of content you would want to rank high in the search engines. Yoast will help you define cornerstone articles for your site.
What Are the Features of Yoast SEO?
SEO Analysis
Yoast SEO analyzes your content to make sure it can be found well on search engines. It uses the focus keyphrase you set to check if you use this phrase in places where it should appear. For instance, this might be the title of your post, the URL, or the meta description. In addition, it also checks if you use the keyphrase enough in your main content and warns you if you overdo it.
With this analysis, the plugin will tell you how you can optimize your post or page by rating them in red, orange, and green bullets to indicate how every factor scores.
Content SEO analysis includes:
- See if you’ve used your keyphrase in the right places
- Suggest keyphrase synonym
- Check your meta description, titles, internal link, image alt attributes
- Count your text length & meta description length
Readability Analysis
Make sure your content is easy to read to make your readers love them. The readability analysis in Yoast SEO acts as an automatic editor, it scores and suggests you increase your articles’ readability to make them easy to understand for both humans and machines.
Yoast SEO readability analysis includes:
- Flesch Reading Ease score to indicate content’s complexity
- Passive voice check to help you increase the active words on your content
- Checks sentences and paragraphs length
- Count the number of transition words to enhance readability
Google Preview
Check what your content looks like on Google to make sure it entices users to read it.
Yoast SEO Google Preview includes:
- Preview content in search engines
- Optimize SEO title
- Insert meta description
- Add slugs
Schema Control
Schema helps to describe your content for search engines so that they can easily understand what is your content about. Yoast SEO is automatically adding Schema to your content. Besides that, you can describe your page in the Schema tabs.
Yoast SEO Schema Control includes:
- Simply select the type of content for a page
- Sensible defaults, but feel free to edit
- Supports over 20 content types
- Yoast SEO makes all the right connections for you
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps help search engines find your content and immediately let them know when you publish or update pages. With Yoast SEO, you will automatically get robust XML sitemaps for all of your content.
Yoast SEO XML Sitemap includes:
- Allow search engines to quickly discover your content
- Prioritize your most important content
- Determine what goes into your sitemap
- Assists with crawling
Integration with other powerful apps
Yoast SEO has many integrations with powerful apps that can help raise your SEO.
- Algolia – improve site search & help users find your most important content
- Elementor – optimize your content right inside the Elementor
- Slack – make your pages stand out in Slack and drive traffic to your website
- Semrush – find high-performing keywords target from Semrush to rank well
- Zapier – automatically share your content on the platforms of your choice
In addition to the features mentioned above, Yoast SEO also provides you with other useful features. For instance, internal linking block, stale cornerstone content finder, redirect attachment URLs, how-to block, orphaned content finder, internal linking suggestions, breadcrumbs control, redirect manager, canonical URL tags, robots meta tags, and many more.
Why Should I Use Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO plugin can help you optimize your SEO content even though you don’t fully understand how SEO works. All you need to do is install the plugin, write your content, and Yoast SEO will automatically check them and suggest to you the part that needs to be fixed.
Moreover, this plugin includes important features to help your content rank high in the search engine, such as a powerful built-in content analysis feature, duplicate content management, titles and sub-titles, rich snippets, social features, and others.
One of the big advantages of Yoast SEO is the free version does work wonderfully as an SEO tool. Even though it has a few limitations compared to the premium version, you still get the key features of SEO. Making Yoast SEO the must-have SEO plugin for WordPress sites.
Is Yoast SEO Free?
Yes, besides its premium plugin, Yoast SEO also provides a free plugin that has covered many important features for SEO. You can download Yoast SEO free plugin here.
How Is Yoast SEO Pricing?
Yoast SEO Premium plugin starts from $89/ year for 1 site. You will get a discount for purchasing plans for more than 1 site.
Tutorial
Pros
- Provides a free version that does work greatly
- Easy to use
- Useful features for SEO
Cons
- Premium version is pretty expensive
- The plugin takes up space
What Are the Alternatives to Yoast SEO?
There are other SEO plugins that you can use other than Yoast SEO:
- All in One SEO Pack – The second most popular WordPress SEO plugin with 3+ million active installations.
- SEOPress – All-around solution capable of handling all standard configuration settings such as titles, Meta descriptions, sitemaps, structured data, Twitter cards, and so on.
- The SEO Framework – Simple and lightweight SEO plugin.
Conclusion
WP Yoast SEO is a great plugin for WordPress SEO. It has many key features such as content SEO analysis, readability analysis, Google preview, Schema control, XML sitemaps, and many more. Compared to other SEO plugins, Yoast SEO provides important SEO features that work automatically and is easy to use. It provides both free and premium versions where even the free version works wonderfully to improve your SEO.
References
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