Is your SEO controlling you?
First, here are the basics on Yoast SEO. Second, we’ll talk about Yoast’s new 15.1 update—full of user-friendly ways to make your website’s SEO better.
Yoast is a robust SEO tool for web developers and marketers.
Well, Yoast SEO gives you full control over your website’s SEO as well as its listing in Google.
With Yoast SEO, you have the chance to set templates for page titles and meta descriptions, easily optimizing them with the snippet editor function. It shows the strengths and weaknesses of your listing, including the opportunity to enter a focus keyword and recommending the proper key word density. These capability make your site easier for search engines to find and boost click-through rates.
While other plugins only permit you to add a piece of content to the beginning or the end of posts in your RSS feed, Yoast SEO allows you to add to both, meaning you can link back to your blog and specific blog post. This is incredibly helpful when a lot of people are combing through your blog.
Yoast’s content analysis feature also assesses the readability of a post by checking sentence and paragraph length, keyword density in sub-headings, transition words, and use of the passive voice. It also let’s you know whether or not you have added internal or external links. If Yoast decides you have failed in too many of these areas, you’ll see a red frown face indicating poor optimization. Great SEO gives you a green happy face, which is rewarding. What’s great about these features? You and your readers will get the most out of what’s been written.
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Even more, Yoast SEO gives you the freedom to choose settings on a per-page basis. This allows you to keep a specific page, category, tag, or custom taxonomy out of the index or sitemap. You can also set Open Graph tags that specific images, titles and descriptions for social media. Then, it’s lets you see exactly what your posts will look like when you share them—without affecting other aspects of your website.
Yoast SEO includes a canonical link element. This prevents duplicate content issues that can confuse how Google indexes your content. This functionality differentiates the original (or preferred) page from duplicates, as well providing as a primary category solution for selecting multiple categories for a post while still favoring the main category. It even lets you edit robots.txt and .htaccess files from the Files editor, an essential feature that controls how search engines see and interact with your site.
Yoast 15.1 features integration with SEM Rush…And More.
Once again, the Yoast team has demonstrated their continuous commitment to upgrading its already powerful capabilities. As always, this release has anticipated the needs of both its free and premium users. Released in October 2020, Yoast release 15.1 includes these valuable improvements:
- A new SEMrush integration for finding related keyphrases (Free and Premium). Thanks to Yoast’s new partnership with SEM Rush, this is the hottest capability in the new update. It provide you with keyword data while working on content—including finding related keywords inside the Post Editor. This addition is an integration with SEM Rush, a world-class provider of tools for SEO.
- Farsi keyphrase recognition (Free and Premium). In addition to providing Hebrew and Arabic language support, Yoast is taking on SEO for Farsi with better sentence and keyword recognition.
- An improved look for the internal linking suggestions (Premium). Yoast’s 14.7 release upgraded the ability to improve your site structure by linking to relevant content. The 15.1 release bumps up this capability with new visual elements, including distinguishing between cornerstone content, regular posts and other post types.
- Improved optimization of your SEO data (Free and Premium). The update makes it easier to improve optimization with a “magic button” that combines processes to increase site speed and get an overview of content.
While CMS systems like WordPress give you some basic SEO capabilities, Yoast takes you so much further. Especially if you are not a technical HTML whiz, this plugin provides you with the control you need to boost your page ranking. The bottom line is that SEO can be so much easier and effective with Yoast. Once you install the plugin, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.
