Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO offers numerous tools and features that can help you boost your SEO and optimize your content. While most of the features will influence the SEO of your entire site, there are other features that will help you optimize individual posts and pages for search engines. Using the free Yoast SEO plugin you can access all the essential SEO tools but it is advisable to use Yoast SEO Premium if you want to use additional SEO features.

To make your posts and pages rank higher and appear in the top search results, you can use the SEO Yoast plugin to optimize them. To do so, you need to create/edit posts or pages on WordPress and on the right-hand side, you can click on the Yoast SEO premium toolbar to find numerous Yoast SEO tools. These tools will help you optimize your posts and pages for your website. Besides this, the tool will also help you in improving the quality of the overall content by offering tools like Readability Analysis, SEO Analysis and more.

Below are some of the important tools that help you improve the quality of your content and the rankings of your posts and pages on the search engine.

  • Focus keyphrase

After you are done with your keyword research you can use the Focus keyphrase tool to set a focus keyphrase for an article in Yoast SEO. Setting the Focus keyphrase will help you optimize your posts and pages for the keywords or keyphrases you want them to rank for. You can also click on the Get related keyphrases button to get the related keywords and optimize your posts and pages more efficiently.

Also, you should choose your focus keyphrases wisely, and choose those keywords that are inside your posts’ Title, URL and Meta Descriptions.

  • Readability analysis

It is important to use the correct key phrases to optimize your content and boost its rank but keep in mind that this should not impact the readability of your write-up. So, if you are using the correct keywords and creating amazing SEO-friendly content, it is of no use if your audience cannot understand it. Therefore, it is important to ensure that your content is reader-friendly. And that is where the readability analysis feature of Yoast SEO comes in.

With readability analysis, you can optimize your content in a way that your readers can easily understand it. Readability analysis will check your content for various parameters including reading ease, sentence length, passive voice used, etc. and will show the results in the form of red, orange and green bullets to indicate how every factor scores. You need to edit your content accordingly and make all the bullets green. Refer to the screenshots below.

  • SEO analysis

SEO analysis in the SEO Yoast plugin helps you to optimize your content based on the focus keyphrase that you have set for your posts or pages. SEO analysis will check your content for various parameters including the length of your text, the number of times you have used the keyphrases, the usage of internal links and more. After the analysis is done, the plugin will show the results in the form of red, orange and green bullets to indicate how every factor scores. These coloured bullets will guide you to optimize the content on your posts and page so that they can rank well for chosen key phrases. All you need to do is make an effort, do the editing and make all the bullets in green.

Yoast SEO premium comes loaded with Google Preview and Social Media previews (Usually Facebook and Twitter). Using the previews feature, you can optimize your posts to attract your target and potential viewers.  With Google and Social Media previews you will have the flexibility to change the image, title and description for Google as well as Facebook and Twitter. While Yoast SEO will handle all of the technical details of sizes, formats and layouts for you.

  • Google preview

In Yoast SEO, Google preview will provide you with an idea with respect to how your posts will look in the Google search engine and how your viewers will see them. This will help you to make your content stand out on Google. You can set a specific title, add a slug and create the meta description. Also, if you want, you can set one standard structure for all of your posts.

For post type pages
SEO title:

For post-type pages, there is no need to create a SEO title for Google preview. The title will be automatically formed as per the template provided for the specific post type.

For eg: below is the SEO title template for the Blog Posts pages. Here Title will be the title of the post while the Site title will be Capgemini.

Slug:

In the Slug field, you need to type the slug of the post which is the phrase before the last forward slash in the URL.

Meta description:

In the meta description field, you need to insert an excerpt, and the meta description for the post will be automatically created.

For pages

SEO title:

For individual pages, you have to manually create an SEO title for Google Preview. You need to include keywords in the title and then at the end include a pipe separator to add the Site title Capgemini.

For eg: below is the SEO title for the industry (Smart Mobility) page. Here the title has been created using the keywords listed below and is followed by the Site title Capgemini.

  • smart mobility – 6000
  • smart mobility solutions – 2600
  • smart mobility roadmap – 80
Slug:

In the Slug field, you need to type the slug of the post which is the phrase before the last forward slash in the URL.

Meta description:

In the meta description field, you need to create the meta description by including a brief about your page. Usually, the character limits to write the meta description is 160 characters.

  • Facebook preview

With Facebook preview, you can optimize the presentation of your content to make it look good while sharing on Facebook. With Facebook preview, you will have the flexibility to set a specific title, add a description and select the desired image for each post or page that you share on Facebook. Here also, you can set one standard structure for all of your posts, if you want.

For post type pages

SEO title:

For post-type pages, there is no need to create an SEO title for Facebook preview. The title will be automatically formed as per the template provided for the specific post type.

For eg: below is the SEO title template for the Blog Posts pages. Here Title will be the title of the post while the Site title will be Capgemini.

Facebook description:

In the Facebook description field, you need to insert an excerpt, and the description for the post will be automatically created.

For pages

SEO title:

For individual pages also, there is no need to create an SEO title for Facebook preview. The title will be automatically formed as per the template provided for the specific post type.

For eg: below is the SEO title for the industry (Smart Mobility) page. Here Title will be the title of the post while the Site title will be Capgemini.

Facebook description:

In the Facebook description field, you need to create the description by including a brief about your page. Usually, the character limit to write the description is 160 characters.

  • Twitter preview

With Twitter preview, you can have a quick preview of your post that you want to share on Twitter and can even optimize its presentation to attract your target viewers. With the Twitter preview feature, you will have the flexibility to set a specific title, add a Twitter description and select the desired image for each post or page that you are sharing on Twitter. Here also, you can set one standard structure for all of your posts, if you want.

For post type pages

SEO title:

For post-type pages, there is no need to create an SEO title for Twitter preview. The title will be automatically formed as per the template provided for the specific post type.

For eg: below is the SEO title template for the Blog Posts pages. Here Title will be the title of the post while the Site title will be Capgemini.

Twitter description:

In the Twitter description field, you need to insert an excerpt, and the description for the post will be automatically created.

For pages

SEO title:

For individual pages also, there is no need to create an SEO title for Twitter preview. The title will be automatically formed as per the template provided for the specific post type.

For eg: below is the SEO title for the industry (Smart Mobility) page. Here Title will be the title of the post while the Site title will be Capgemini.

Twitter description:

In the Twitter description field, you need to create the description by including a brief about your page. Usually, the character limits to write the description is 160 characters.

Under the advanced features tab, you can choose to manage and customize individual SEO settings for your posts and pages. Following are the advanced features that you can use with Yoast SEO:

  • Allow search engines to show this blog post in search results

Using this feature, you can choose what posts or pages you want the search engines to show in the search results. You can choose Yes from the dropdown to make the post or page visible in the search results, and No to not allow the search engine to display it in the search results.

  • Should search engines follow links on this blog post

In the advanced features tab of Yoast SEO, you can allow or block search engines from following links in a post or a page, by selecting the Yes or No radio buttons.

Canonicals URLs are useful when you have a lot of similar content that you need to manage. For your ease, Yoast SEO will automatically add canonical tags to all content marked for indexing. A canonical URL is considered the URL of the best representative page of the same or duplicate pages.