Working with WordPress introduces you to a lot of fancy terms which you may or may not have encountered before. This also includes something called YOAST. So what is YOAST and why is it so popular?
YOAST is one of the most popular WordPress plugins because it’s designed to make your website as search-friendly as possible.
Regardless of whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re an SEO professional managing a website for a client, YOAST SEO can do it all and more. YOAST SEO may be downloaded on any self-hosted WordPress site. It’s one of the most comprehensive SEO-related WordPress plugins available. One of the best things about YOAST is that it’s free. Extra functionality can be bought by upgrading to premium YOAST SEO. However, the most important functions of YOAST are part of the free plugin. Controlling titles and meta descriptions, setting targeted keywords while tracking how often you’re using them, managing sitemaps, and a lot more are all covered by YOAST.
Remember: a plugin won’t optimize your site for you, it just makes it easier for you to do so and subscribe to SEO best practices.
Benefits of using YOAST
There are plenty of reasons as to why you should be using YOAST. Let’s have a look at a couple of them.
1. Automatic SEO optimization
YOAST automatically extends WordPress’s standard SEO features. YOAST SEO automatically optimizes meta tags as well as other link elements that search engines read before revealing results to users. If your site isn’t optimized well, YOAST will remind you to enable permalinks. It also lets you control pages while deciding if you would like to hide specific pages from the public.
2. Writing help and page analysis
One of the most obvious benefits of using this plugin is that it continuously monitors your work while suggesting improvements. An example of this is that the plugin will let you know if you’ve used a keyword correctly or not. Words are automatically counted for you and better headlines suggested. The plugin also warns you about other writing elements that have the potential to position your article on the search results page. If you have a tendency to write long sentences, YOAST will advise you to re write them. When creating titles as well as descriptions, YOAST SEO shows you a preview first. This lets you emulate a search page result before going public. As you can imagine, this is a game-changer for anyone who hasn’t used YOAST before.
3. XML sitemaps
Search engines have to look through your whole site when you don’t have a sitemap. YOAST lets you generate a sitemap by selecting a single option. This helps search engines read your website correctly so that they can index your website appropriately.
4. Social Integration
Sites which aren’t connected to social media aren’t worth much in 2021. YOAST has options embedded for popular social media sites so that you don’t have to waste time worrying about sharing content correctly. YOAST SEO is a plugin that every site owner must use. There are plenty of other plugins that also do a fantastic job. However, YOAST takes the cake. If you don’t use YOAST, you might get left behind. It does an amazing job of positioning your articles in search engine results so that you can grow your business while connecting with more people.
It’s really important to remember that SEO is an ongoing process and you will need to optimise each blog post & page you create using the YOAST page analysis tool in order to make your site truly optimised.
