Updated on August 15th, 2022
Yoast, the long time friend of on-page SEO, has been the trusted copilot of bloggers for many years. As a company, they have a wealth of experience in all facets of website optimisation which we have faith in to steer our content.
Obviously their well respected WordPress plugin: Yoast SEO is the premiere product at the front of their brand, but what else do they have to offer us as a blogging destination?
As part of our exploration of all things SEO, we became curious as to what other treasures Yoast may have to help us as website creators and content builders.
Here’s what we found…
Yoast SEO Plugin– a tried and tested SEO favourite
Regardless of newcomers to the space, Yoast SEO is still the most trusted on-page SEO tool available. The app is rock solid and you can be assured that it’s up-to-date with the latest trends and information.
Many people are already very familiar with the plugin. It allows you to maximise the probability of your webpage getting a high ranking in search engine results.
Accordingly as you’re writing each piece of website content, you can structure your writing in such a way that it’s more likely to be ranked at the top of Google and get more clicks. The following snippet gives a glimpse of the type of metrics that measured in a standard post:
The page checking is dynamic and automatically updates as you write and edit. We particularly like their recent integration with the Elementor page builder. This allows you to use a version of Yoast within the SEO plug-in.
The resulting time-saving benefits are powerful as you no longer have to back out of Elementor to get to Yoast.
Yoast also checks the readability of your post or page. Using the Flesch test, you can easily see the reading difficulty of your content.
The aim for most online content is to make the prose as easy to read as possible.
Other things that are tested include paragraph length and the use of transition words.
Free vs Premium Yoast
We are firmly of the belief that the free Yoast SEO plugin is perfect for beginner bloggers. However as your traffic grows and your website skills develop, you might want to look at the premium option.
The ability to optimise for more than one keyword is an obvious advantage of Yoast premium.
The premium product also allows you to find related keywords more easily using a data integration with Semrush. We also really like how it lets you know if any of your articles haven’t been updated in six months or more.
Google loves “fresh” content and the ability of Yoast to monitor your older articles helps to refresh the SEO of your content.
Training courses – free and paid
Many courses in the Yoast SEO Academy are totally free and available to all.
If you want to know how to best structure your site for SEO, they’ve got a free course:
How about the best way to use the Yoast SEO plugin? Well there’s a free course on that too:
New to WordPress? There’s a free course to help you get started:
Yoast Blog
Here at OnlineSiteBuilders, we’re always referring back to the Yoast blog. In fact, it’s probably the online resource that we use the most.
Why do we like it so much? Well, the information is direct and actionable. There’s no fluff whatsoever.
Many of their posts also run against the view that blog posts need to be long.
For example, this post is short and sweet but is really valuable. It answers a key question that many bloggers have: how to make a post now show up in search results.
Iit answers the key question succinctly: how to exclude a web page from Google search.
Summary – Yoast Review
In the field of SEO, Yoast stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of corporate experience.
While there are many newcomers to the field, they continue to offer a reliable source of usable knowledge.
Whether or not you use the Yoast SEO plugin you should be tapping into the expertise and freeTraining resources on this site.
Frequently Asked Questions – Yoast
Is Yoast premium worth the cost?
Yes, for the serious blogger, at $89 pa Yoast Premium can take your SEO to the next level. You can do this in many ways by optimising for multiple keywords and finding related tangential keyword suggestions. It will also help you to keep your older content fresh and relevant for the search engines.
Do web pages rank or do websites rank in Google?
Web pages rank and websites do not rank. This is unequivocal.
Can you use Yoast to change the meta description of a post?
Yes, you can easily change this using the meta description editor within Yoast SEO. Your meta title (otherwise known as SEO title) can be different from your H1 post title. This is particularly useful for updating older posts with new relevant dates etc.
Does Yoast have other plugins apart from Yoast SEO?
Yes, they have a number of other WordPress plugins such as Video SEO for WordPress, Local SEO for WordPress, News SEO for WordPress and Yoast Woocommerce SEO.
Can you create a Sitemap with Yoast SEO?
Yes absolutely. All you need to do is to set it up once. Then go into your webmaster tools (eg Google or Bing) and link it to the sitemap. The file sits in the root directory of your website and is usually called sitemap.xml.
I have one post on my website. Why isn’t the post ranking in search results?
Search engines such as Google like to see that your site is legitimate and growing with a number of web pages. Once they get comfort that your site is worthy, they should start ranking your pages.
What program should I use to SEO my website and get listed in Google?
Yoast SEO can help you greatly with on page SEO. It will help you optimise your content so that it has the best chance of appearing on page 1 of Google search results.
What types of content does Yoast help you optimise?
There are many factors including keyword density in paragraphs, headings and images. Also considered in the traffic light measuring system are things like readability, paragraph length and the use of transition words.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
