The most popular CMS today, WordPress can certainly be argued as the one-stop solution for a blog site. All that’s responsible for making it the blue-eyed boy in the digital world is its user friendliness that gets a lot of support from the plugins built for the platform. Among them, Yoast SEO is the one that helps create optimized contents that can reach more potential users with more probabilities of clicks and engagement.
Catch the Attention
The snippet preview allows you to view how your post would appear on the SERPs. It helps you determine whether your title is too long or it should have some additional letters. It also lets you know about the meta descriptions that should match the context of the search result. This is how the plugin enables you to catch the attention of the searchers and increase the click through rate. Moreover, it also helps to increase the ranking.
Analysis
The page analysis feature of Yoast SEO helps you check minor errors that don’t get noticed easily. For example, it tells you whether the uploaded image in the post has an alt tag or not. It also checks whether the meta description contains the focus keyword and the post includes subheadings. Even, it suggests meta descriptions according to the tags, category and custom taxonomy archives.
Technicalities
It’s a well-known fact that WordPress is good for SEO. Still, it requires some modifications in the settings. Yoast SEO plays an important role in this by reminding you about the permalinks, optimizing and adding meta tags that the search engines prefer a lot. Apart from this, the plugin enables you to control the visibility of the pages on the SERP. For example, it helps you determine which pages will be visible on the search engines and which won’t.
Creating XML Sitemaps
There are several WordPress plugins that can create XML sitemaps. Among them, the plugin that has the most advanced XML sitemaps functions is Yoast SEO. It can automatically create XML sitemaps and notify the search engines about its existence. The sitemap generated by the plugin also contains images from your posts so that they can be found easily by the search engines. No matter, if you have a large or a small site, the sitemap works perfectly.
Integrating Breadcrumbs
If you have a compatible theme, Yoast SEO will help you integrate Breadcrumb functionality that makes an easy navigation for the users. It also helps the search engines understand the entire structure of your site.
Robots.txt and .htaccess Files
The plugin comes with a built-in editor that allows you to edit robots.txt and .htaccess files that would enable you to allow or disallow a particular page, solve canonical issues and redirect a particular URL.
Social Media Optimization
SEO and SMO are inextricably mingled with each other and considering this, Yoast SEO comes with Facebook and Twitter integration that allows you to change or edit your title and meta description that would be visible on two big social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Even, you can change the image if you wish.
Import and Export
The built-in import functionality of the plugin allows you an easy fetch of the old titles and meta descriptions. Even, it’s no more difficult to export your settings to multiple blogs. All you need to do is to install Yoast SEO.
Therefore, don’t act miserly any more in using the plugin. It can help you reach the Treasure Island, overcoming the tempest of the digital sea. Just hang tight and watch how Yoast SEO explores the year 2017.