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What is Yoast SEO and How does it help?

by Jesse Bibbee on

Yoast SEO and its use

Yoast SEO is a plug-in for WordPress that offers the most comprehensive tools to help you write great content and consider certain ranking factors to optimize a website. When you write content for your website, it is easy to forget that you must register for your visitors and search engine algorithms. For instance, Yoast identifies keyword density, internal linking, and assets in your metadata (among other factors), providing signals to writers and web admins. Nevertheless, the creative process, the accuracy of the content, and final decisions still rely on humans. Counting with an SEO agency is the right move if you want to rank higher in search results. They must put a team of experts at your service that makes things easier for you and your business, using and mixing advanced properties of multiple SEO tools. Yet, if you want to give it a try on your own, here is some information about the top features of Yoast SEO.

How do you install YOAST?

  1. You can log into your WordPress account.
  2. Go to Plugins -> Add New -> Search for “YOAST”
  3. Once installed, click the “Configuration Wizard” to go through each step to get everything set up. 
NOTE: Make sure Google Search Console is set up and linked to your WordPress account.

Top features of Yoast SEO

  • Paragraph Structure: Yoast will analyze your content and tell you if your paragraphs are too long or too short and if they need more transitions.
  • Keyword Density: If your post contains too many or too few keywords, your rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) will be affected. Yoast SEO will tell you how often you should be adding keywords.
  • Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: Content that is easy to read is statistically proven to have higher retention rates and more frequent visitors. Yoast SEO analyzes your sentence structures to ensure you create easy-to-read content.
  • Meta and Link Elements: This tool will allow you to show which pages you would like to be displayed on Google and which pages you would like to be hidden.
  • XML Sitemaps: A sitemap will work as a roadmap to your site and lead Google to your most important areas. Yoast SEO creates an XML Sitemap for you.
  • Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs help your site because it allows users to navigate your site more accessible, which in turn, enhances their user experience. Yoast SEO will output JSON-LD data in the source code.