Do You Use WordPress SEO by Yoast?

If you have any interest in SEO and use WordPress chances are you have heard of a popular search engine optimization plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast.  I know it sounds like it’s a made up word or that annoying board game at family gatherings that everyone pretends to go somewhere when your Aunt pulls it out.  But, stay tuned because I am going to show you all about this WordPress plugin created by Yoast.

So basically, I had no prior experience working with the Yoast plugin until I did a guest post on Wade’s blog at http://bloggersmakemoney.com.  I can say with 100% confidence that it’s easy to use and pretty much tells you what you are missing to make your pages SEO friendly.

General Settings

Basically, you put in your targeted keyword in the field.  Then make sure you put your keyword in the title tag (closer to the beginning the better).  Insert your keywords in the meta description (once again closer towards the beginning for best results).  Finally, your meta keywords; use your keyword you are targeting first and then your h2,h3,h4 title tags so Google doesn’t screw you for keyword stuffing.

Page Analysis

This is where you will get your onpage page analysis.  It shows green (for good), yellow for (ok, but could be improved), and red (for change or you really need to consider making these changes.).  These are 13 lights ranging from anything from keyword density, to how easy text is to read (it’s called Flesch Reading Ease),  your OBL, etc.

Advanced Settings

Finally, you can go into the advanced settings and noindex, nofollow, regulate robot.txt access, include in sitemaps, Canonical URL, and finally 301 redirect individual pages.

Yoast Is Great!

Really, there is not much to it and I easily learned it in under 2 minutes.  Up by where you submit publish, schedule, save draft, and preview there is a little icon you can push that checks your post.  Really, this is a good little plugin if your theme doesn’t have one integrated into it or if you would rather deactivate your integrated one and use Yoast, which I would recommend at this point.

Dragon Blogger Notes:

My readers, I have converted most of my blogs including DragonBlogger.com from the All in One SEO plugin to using WordPress SEO by Yoast and my writers, guest bloggers and my own impression is that it is better and helps with on page SEO optimization by encouraging writers to double check, choose target keywords.  It took less than 1/2 hour for my writers to get used to the plugin and they now all write posts that pass all SEO checks in green.  I have only switched a few weeks ago so it is too early to show if there is a huge SERP benefit, but I can tell readers that importing the AIO SEO data was simple so none of your previous SEO data is lost, it easily imports into WordPress SEO by Yoast.

Also, the plugin generates your Sitemap.xml files for you and does so dynamically and I had to switch when my old sitemap plugin failed to generate sitemaps anymore.  You won’t find a better plugin for free, it has many features from several other plugins combined into a single plugin as well.

-Dragon Blogger

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Garen Arnold

Garen Arnold runs a site to show people who are confused on how easy it is start a blog . Take action today and stop telling yourself everyday your going to get started on a blog and do it; it's simple!

Latest posts by Garen Arnold (see all)

• Do You Use WordPress SEO by Yoast? - October 1, 2012