Do you want to increase the number of viewers on your site?
If yes, then you must use a search engine optimization (SEO) plugin to make your posts search engine friendly. Such plugins suggest appropriate changes to get a good ranking on search queries leading to more viewership.
Yoast SEO is one such SEO plugin for optimization which we are personally using on this site. You may have noticed that our site is already running Google Adsense ads, thanks to Yoast SEO plugin for playing a part in reaching this milestone. In this post, we will share the benefits of this plugin and areas where improvement is needed.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Once we install and activate this plugin, it will insert a meta box below the page editor, as shown below.
This meta box provides us with several options to increase the online presence of our posts. We discuss a few of the areas next.
Focus Keyphrase
In a search query, few words are of particular interest to Google to display the results. These are known as keywords. The various advertisers bid for these keywords. So, from the website monetization point of view, these are of great importance.
For example, see the forecast of the lower and upper limit of search volume for the keyword ‘Yoast SEO plugin’ and similar keywords. Further, see the range of bid values for these keywords.
So, if your post has these keywords at the right place and in the right amount, then a higher chance is there that your post will get a better ranking in search results.
With the focus keyphrase, we provide a keyword to the plugin to target. The plugin will then give all recommendations regarding this keyphrase to improve the visibility of our content.
Preview
It has a preview option showing how our article will appear in Google’s search results for desktops and mobile devices. We have all kinds of control available to modify this view.
SEO Analysis
Once we have keyed in the various inputs, the plugin will provide recommendations for improving search visibility. These recommendations are related to internal and outbound links, images, keyphrase positioning and density, etc.
Readability Analysis
Now comes the language part of the analysis. The plugin will suggest various changes regarding paragraph lengths, sentence lengths, passive voice, transition words, etc. Further, it will also mention good aspects of your article.
Sitemap Submission
Yoast SEO also does the work of submission of Sitemap to search engines to ensure that your changes propagate quickly to the outside world. Please read a related article about updates on pages.
Notifications
Yoast SEO plugin will also notify you about any serious SEO problem with the site. For example, please see below one such notification about a site.
Areas of Improvement
Yoast SEO comes up with good recommendations about SEO and readability. However, it lacks in a major area of grammatical corrections. Further, the recommendations related to readability are restricted to usage of active voice, transition words, etc.
To compensate for these shortcomings, one can use an online tool Grammerly to correct grammatical mistakes and improve sentence construct.
Summary
In this post, we saw the types of suggestions provided by the Yoast SEO plugin to improve the searchability of our articles. This was done with an example for better understanding.
Besides the SEO plugin, one can also visit my article “Essential WordPress Plugins List for a Website” to find a list of handpicked plugins that will enable you to build a secure, SEO friendly website quickly.
If you have any doubts or queries, you can always drop a comment to get an answer. Cheers!