The great thing about WordPress is that it lends itself to good SEO practices right out of the box. The code is lean and tidy, which means it gives searchbots less irrelevant junk to sift through, and this clean code foundation results in sites that have comparatively fast load times favored by Google. Moreover, WordPress is designed to show search bots the content of your site before the Javascript and CSS. You can set up your permalinks so that they include keywords. It prompts you to add keywords and change the title any time you add an image. In general, it’s just all-around great. But there are myriad plugins that have been developed to improve upon WordPress’s SEO performance too, and Yoast SEO has emerged as one of the leaders of that pack in the past few years. In this post, we’ll explore whether Yoast is still a standout performer, and what it can do to increase your site’s SEO-friendliness.
Advantage 1: Consolidating Keyword Settings in WordPress
Yoast SEO makes it easy to deal with page titles, descriptions, and URLs sitewide. Simply navigate to the “Ttiles & Metas” tab in Yoast’s settings, where you’ll find options to customize the homepage, post types, taxonomies, and archives. If there’s any disadvantage, it may be that the options can overwhelm a lay user, but it does give you plenty of room to grow your SEO strategy. To learn the basics of setting up Yoast, here’s a great guide.
Advantage 2: Prompts to Customize Keywords
One of the thing we love about Yoast is that it adds a Yoast SEO box on your post editor pages, allowing you to add a meta title and description right there. These meta titles are normally generated automatically by WordPress based on the settings you chose when you set up your site, but Yoast allows you to switch it up if you want to really home in on a keyword target. It also allows you to choose a focus keyword for your post (or page), then it analyzes your text content against that focus keyword and gives you an SEO score. With the premium version of Yoast, you can even target more than one keyword. There’s nothing like that realtime feedback to help you optimize your SEO appeal.
Advantage 3: Easily Hiding or Showing Content
WordPress doesn’t make it easy to hide pages that are published, but sometimes you need to hide a page from Google for SEO purposes… or maybe you’ve got a landing page that you don’t want indexed and drawing people away from your homepage. Yoast SEO lets you restrict search engine indexing easily, by adding a no-index tag with just a click.
Yoast SEO also adds “canonical link elements” throughout your website; in other words, it allows you to specify the canonical—or preferred—version of a web page, so search engines will display the one you choose first. You can learn more about canonical link elements here.
Advantage 4: Better Access to Robots and .htaccess Files
Typically, you wouldn’t be able to access your robots.txt or .htaccess files through your WordPress dashboard—in fact, you’d probably rather run in the other direction than edit these obscure files. Yoast SEO lets you edit these files right inside your WordPress dashboard, if you need to. And we do suggest using caution before tackling them.
Advantage 5: XML Sitemaps
Yoast SEO lets you generate an XML sitemap that is automatically updated—and sent to Google and Bing—any time a new post or page is published. It even lets you specifiy any post types, posts, or taxonomies that should be excluded from the sitemap. There are individual plugins that just generate XML sitemaps, so it’s great to have a single plugin to cover this SEO need.
There are other features that come with a premium, paid version of the plugin, like redirect management. While we love the idea of making it easier to manage redirects, hopefully it’s not something you’re doing very often. (We always recommend setting up a good permalink structure and sticking with it.) In general, the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin is pretty robust, and almost certainly you’ll have more optimization options than you could know what to do with. If you run a WordPress website that you rely upon for income, we have no doubt the Yoast SEO plugin can give you a bump if you use it wisely. (By the way, if you’ve ever wondered why it’s called “Yoast,” it’s a play on the creator’s name, Joost de Valk… “Joost” is pronounced “yoast.”)
If you need help with SEO or SEO plugins… contact us any time!
