Is your website showing up in Google search results? Optimizing your website’s content for search engines can increase your odds of appearing at the top of the list. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help increase visitor traffic to your website using specific key terms people use to search for the products and services you offer. The problem? SEO can be hard to manage. However, there’s an incredibly helpful tool available to make the process of optimizing your website a whole lot easier. That’s why My AIM Store would like to provide you with the following benefits and tips for using the Yoast SEO plugin to improve traffic to your website.
Yoast Plugin Benefits
Quite frankly, Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins for a WordPress website. Not only is it free, but it has also received a 5-star rating from millions of users from around the world. Apart from improving SEO, this plugin offers a wide variety of features to ensure the success of your website.
- Includes a snippet preview that allows you to view and adjust how your post will read in search results.
- Provides page analysis that checks keyphrase density testing and the length of your content, title, and metadata description. It also provides you with a list of problems and improvements, along with results of the things you’ve done right. Red is bad, orange is okay, and green is great.
- XML sitemaps: With its advanced XML sitemaps feature, Yoast creates XML sitemaps automatically and informs Google of its existence.
- Social integration: Yoast allows you to customize how your page or post will appear on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
- The readability analysis helps you determine how readable your post is to other people.
In a nutshell, Yoast is one of the best plugins for creating a successful SEO strategy for your website. Not only does it help you create great content that can be easily indexed with major search engines, but it will also analyze your content and advise you to do specific things to boost your visibility.
Adding Yoast to Your Website
It’s simple and easy to download the Yoast SEO plugin and add it to your WordPress website. While you can download the paid version that includes additional features and support, the free version is just as good. That’s the one we are going to cover below:
- On the backend dashboard of your website, hover over “Plugins” from the left column menu and click “Add New.”
- Then enter “Yoast SEO” in the search box.
- Locate the Yoast SEO plugin shown below and click “Install Now”, and wait a few moments for it to download before clicking “Activate.”
Once activated, you can find and adjust the Yoast settings at the bottom of each page or post of your website before you publish.
For additional help, you can click here to view the following video on how to install Yoast for your WordPress website.
Optimizing Your Pages & Posts
Once you’ve created content that you’re ready to publish, add your targeted keyword to the “Focus Keyword” box to start optimizing.
Next, you’ll find that the Yoast SEO plugin provides you with two sets of recommendations “SEO Analysis” and “Readability”. Under each section, you will find an analysis list of problems, improvements, and good results to help you optimize your content. Simply click the arrow icon beside each heading to view the recommendations.
SEO Analysis
To further guide you, let’s take a look at the SEO Analysis section of the Yoast plugin for some additional tips.
- It’s best to include a few internal links to relevant content within your website throughout your content.
- It’s best to add a “featured image” or additional images throughout your content with alt attributes that contain your focus keyword.
- Make sure your content is at least 300 words or longer on each page or post.
- Customize your SEO title to ensure optimal length. It’s also a good idea to add your company name. For example: “Choosing Images That Catch & Hold Attention | My AimStore”
- Try to include outbound links to other reputable websites with relevant information throughout your content.
- Make sure to use your focus keyword in the first paragraph of your page or post.
- Use long-tail keywords. The longer your keyphrase is, the fewer competitors you’ll have to compete with for that specific term.
- Try to use your targeted keyword at least three times throughout your content.
- Make sure you include your targeted keyword within your meta description. This description should be 120-156 characters in length.
- Try not to use the same keyword for different pages or posts. Doing so can cause you to compete with yourself in search results.
- Try to use your targeted keyword in higher subheadings.
- Make sure to use your target keyword is used within the title as well as the URL.
Readability
Next, you’ll want to check your readability recommendations. While some suggestions won’t be perfect, they can help you make adjustments that make your content easier to read.
- Use transition words. Doing so will help your content flow from one thought to another.
- Try not to start each sentence with the same word.
- Check your Flesch reading score. Lower scores on a scale of 1-100 are more difficult to read.
- Keep the length of your paragraphs short and to the point.
- You’ll also want to maintain short sentences – under 20 words.
- Try to use an active voice instead of a passive voice for clarity.
- Break up the length of your content with subheadings. Doing so makes it easier to read and scan your content.
Social
Using the social media tab, you can use a different title, description, or image when your page or post is shared on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Without updating this tab, your standard title, meta description, and featured image will be used.
In A Nutshell
Installing and using the Yoast SEO plugin isn’t as hard as it may seem. In fact, it’s really quite simple. Once added, it can help improve your content’s SEO and readability while allowing you to adjust how snippets looks on major search engine and social media posts. While your content may not be perfect in every way, Yoast can provide you with recommendations for improvement – especially when they’re highlighted for you!
So what are you waiting for? Install Yoast SEO today and keep your website up-to-date.