So we hear all the time that optimizing your posts for SEO is the best thing you can do. You spend all this time creating a post and if someone found your article through a Google search and shared it with their friends, you’re SET! Search engines can be tricky when it comes to promoting your post on organic searches and that’s where the beauty of YOAST SEO comes in. It’s easy. It’s simple. It’s user friendly. And most importantly, it gets you seen by more people.
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Accomplishing a high rank without putting in tons of time and work into each post is nearly impossible. But with Yoast, it makes this process a lot easier! Yoast is a WordPress plugin that makes optimizing your posts a piece of cake. So let’s walk through these sections of Yoast that you definitely need to know in order to be an SEO super star!
1 | SOCIAL MEDIA SETTINGS
Connecting all your social media to this plugin is a pretty awesome feature that Yoast provides. Since all the social networks connected to your site have an impact on SEO, it makes sense that Yoast has an easy way for you to connect your main accounts with this plugin. Just go to the social settings, this is what the account page looks like:
2 | SNIPPET EDITOR
This section contains the blurb of what your post will look like on Google’s search pages. In this section, you can edit the snippet below your title to say whatever you want. For best optimization, try to use key words that tie in with your post. Also, try to incorporate you Focus Keyword.
3 | FOCUS KEYWORD
This word is what kind of ties your whole post together. It sums up what your post is about. It can be one word, several words, or even a short sentence. Think of it this way; if you were writing a post on how to clean carpets without leaving any stains, you would use keywords to go along with your post. Think about if you were searching for a carpet cleaning post; what would you type into the Google search box? Thinking of this should help you to come up with a killer Focus Keyword. The name of the game is to get all the green lights!
4 | CONTENT ANALYSIS
This is the section where you see how much your post is optimized as to what you have and haven’t added to it. Word count, outbound links, image keywords, meta description and page URL are all very important things to optimize for SEO. The colors on the side indicate how strongly you’ve optimized with red being poor, yellow being better, and green being completely optimized. If you possibly can, try to have all your circles green.
Once you’ve written your post and optimized it, you’re ready for publication. Now, search engines will be able to find your post more easily and more people will see it.
5 | XML SITEMAPS
When I used to design websites for clients I would see that they had the YOAST SEO plugin as well as a plugin to generate a sitemap for them. Surprise! Yoast actually generates one for you so you can delete the extra sitemap plugin during your plugin spring cleaning session! Having too many plugins installed on your site slows your site down which is no good, of course, so keeping the list at a minimum by letting Yoast do its thing may be a good idea.
6 | SEARCH CONSOLE
The search console is extremely easy to set up. Just click the “Get Google Authorization code” button and then make sure you tell it to “authorize.” After that, it will display a code that you can copy and paste into the box on the search console page in Yoast! Once the code is placed in the box hit “authenticate” and you’ll be good to go!
I hope this post was helpful! If you want to learn more about SEO, than I suggest you check out SEO Simplified. I break everything into simple lessons that will have you cranking out optimized posts in no time!
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