Yoast is about to be your new best friend. If you’re a WordPress user, you’re going to flip for this Fast Friday tip! If optimizing your site for SEO is something you know you should be doing, but get seriously frazzled just thinking about, I have a secret weapon that will turn your website into an SEO powerhouse, with virtually no effort on your end!
Here’s the scoop:
Yoast is a FREE WordPress plugin that basically checks every single thing you put on your website (blog posts, pages, you name it!) and give you tips on how you can improve your SEO. It allows you to easily optimize your site- with zero SEO skills.
Seriously, you just write your content as usual, and then hit up Yoast to see what areas you need to improve. It is that easy!
To transform your website from drab to fab, SEO wise, all you have to do is follow these four simple steps that will take you all of 42 seconds:
- Head to WordPress and log in.
- Once you’re at your dashboard, click ‘plugins’ on the menu bar on the left.
- On the plugins page, type ‘Yoast’ into the search bar.
- Download WordPress SEO by Yoast (it’s usually the first one that pops up).
That’s it! You’re now ready to take your site from drab to fab, SEO wise!
Once Yoast has finished downloading, they’ll give you a little tour, but here’s the 411 on how to use this time-saving tool:
At the bottom of every post (and page), you’ll see this box:
Here’s a little info on each of the things you’ll need to fill out in the Yoast box:
Snippet Preview– This is basically part of the preview that will show up on search engines. Be sure to use something that tells people what the post is about here!
Focus Keyword– This is where you’ll fill in the main keyword you want to use. A few easy tips:
- Use similar, but different keywords for your blog posts. Say you’re a gardner, you might use “gardening tips”, “gardening tools”, “best pesticides for gardens”, and “how to plant flowers” as keywords. They are all a little different, but they’ll all bring people to your gardening site.
- Really think about what types of things people would be searching to find you. If you’re a photographer, don’t just use “family photographer”. Using your location helps, because that’s likely what people would search for!
- While using your keyword in certain places (don’t worry, Yoast will tell you where you need to add it once you’ve let it know what words to look for!), and often, is important, you want to make sure your post sounds natural. Keyword stuffing is when a post uses keywords in a random way, just for the sake of using the keyword a lot. Search engines are smarter than that, and will actually penalize you if you’re trying to be sneaky and add keywords everywhere to improve your rankings. So, use them often, but only where it flows well!
SEO Title– This is the title of your post. Again, make it something that people can read and go “oh, so that’s what this is about!”. It’s helpful to put your keywords first, because search engines like when keywords are in the beginning of the title. Also, it helps to have those words first if people are just skimming what pops up in their search!
Meta Description– This is a summary of your post. It will come up in search engines under the title. Make it short, to the point, and intriguing! Yoast will tell you if it’s too long, or too short. No brainer!
Once you’ve filled in all these areas, you’ll get some basic feedback from Yoast that will tell you if you need to make any changes, and when you scroll up to the publish box on the right, you’ll see a little dot that says SEO.
If you haven’t yet filled out the Yoast boxes, it will appear grey (I like to do mine after I’ve finished!). Otherwise, if the information is filled out, it will appear green for “good”, yellow for “meh”, and red for “this stinks you have some work to do”.
If you have anything other than green, head back to your Yoast box down below and go to the ‘page analysis’ tab. It will break down every single SEO hint, and tell you what you need to work on!
Even if I do get a green for go, I still head to the page analysis tab so that I can make sure every single item is green. Overachievement is always a good thing when it comes to optimizing your site!
So, there you have it. A Fast Friday tip that will turn you into an instant SEO whiz.
There’s a lot more that goes into SEO, but Yoast will give you a HUGE boost! Here are some other components that makeup SEO:
To learn more about SEO and how you can boost your search engine rankings, check out this post:
SEO Made Simple: Understand the Basics of SEO
What are your biggest SEO questions? Shout em out in the comments, or head here to send me an email!
Latest posts by Kimberly Haydn (see all)
- Holiday Hacks + How to Have a Good Enough Christmas (and LOVE it) - December 5, 2018
- Increase Summer Sales with These Marketing Ideas! - July 4, 2018
- Seasons of Change: Navigating Building a Business while Raising Your Children - September 24, 2017