8 awesome ways Yoast will better your WordPress blog

Blogzuola has long understood that search engine optimization is for the most part in continuous change.  Yet, one of the cornerstones of search engine optimization has always been having a blog.  Blogs are a great way to get your opinion across and help others find useful information within a certain industry.  Sometimes, a company will even create several blogs related to their different activities.  Blogging needs to have structure and there are tools that will help you become better bloggers by helping you create high quality content which is relevant to the needs of the industry you are in.  Now, in order to blog you will need a platform which specializes in such a thing.  While there are many out there, one of the most traditional and perhaps the most chosen is WordPress. It is definitely one of the most versatile blogging and website creation platforms available.  In addition to that, WordPress’s open software structure allows users to use a plethora of plugins and tools to improve their blog and many of said tools are great at optimizing for search engines.  Out of all the different tools available, there is one that stands out above the rest and which is the preferred choice for SEO specialists.  Its name is Yoast SEO; rather catchy, isn’t it?  Yoast SEO boosts an already solid SEO platform even further.  So, what can Yoast SEO actually do for you? Let’s look at what the free downloadable version has to offer.

Image courtesy of India7 Network at Flickr.com

1.    Stay on topic with your keyword

 

A great blog post cannot happen until you choose a great topic to write about. This often means choosing a word that will be the central point of the article. You will surely run some keyword analysis tools to make sure you have chosen one which is relevant and current.  Once you tell Yoast what your focus keyword is it will help you detect how well you are actually using the word.  It makes sure that keyword location and amount is appropriate, that means not having to worry about keyword stuffing.

2.    Stand out on search results pages

 

The title of your post and the meta description information that you provide search engines with is crucial to increasing rankings.  Yoast’s handy snippet editor lets you fine tune this most important information to make sure your site will rank as highly as possible on search engines.  It will even show you how the title and meta description will show up on Google, giving you an idea of how effective or eye-catching it is.

3.    Control the bots

 

The information that crawlers get from your site is another key factor for effective SEO.  Yoast can make easy work of this often grueling task.  Just input what you want indexed and what not and let Yoast deal with Google’s bots.  Easy peasy.

4.    To read or not to read? That is the question.

 

Readers need to be able to follow your post without must difficulty.  It must be natural and night mind wrecking.  Yoast helps you determine how readable a post really is.  It checks to see how well you use cohesive devices and whether active voice is the preferred speech pattern.  Furthermore, it tabulates the Flesch Reading Ease score which tells you just how easy the post is to read.

5.    Separate the original from the rest

 

Original content is one the ranking factors for any search engine algorithm.  This means that crawlers should be able to tell the difference between the first post about something and the following ones related to the same content.  Yoast’s canonical link elements plug-is helps you tell Google which are the original post, pages, tags, and categories which will allow the search engine giant to give you a higher, more appropriate ranking.

Image courtesy of Kat Selvocki at Flickr.com

6.    Leave the trail you want to leave

 

Have you ever noticed how on top of some sites there is a sort of summary of the pages you have clicked on to get where you are currently on a site?  Each page is followed by “>>”.  What you are noticing is the breadcrumbs that you have left along the way.  Breadcrumbs in SEO are quite useful because they help both users and robots know where to find specific information on a site.  And you don’t have to click the back button several times to return to previous pages, just click on one of the breadcrumbs and that’s that.  Yoast lets you adapt these breadcrumbs to your will, giving you more control over how users see your site.

7.    Site Mapping has never been easier

 

By now you have probably noticed a trend with Yoast: it’s incredibly user friendly.  This quality is especially helpful when it comes to site mapping, one of the most fundamental elements of any search engine optimization strategy and search engine algorithms.  Site maps give engines the layout of a website and a guide as to how to crawl it.  Yoast helps you control what information search robots will look for and which ones to avoid, something that is extremely helpful for when there is classified or really sensitive information that is for company eyes only.

8.    Last but not least, the all-important robot.txt and .htaccess files

 

Having clear and easy to read robot.txt and .htaccess files will go a long way towards helping Google rank you where it should.  Creating and updating those files is not always an easy task.  Yoast makes it easy, plain and simple.

Yoast is surely one of the best SEO tools you can have if you are on WordPress.  It makes a lot of the hard, technical work in SEO rather easy to do and maintain.