Yoast SEO – Guide to Content Optimization

Small business owners really don’t need one more thing to think about when it comes to online marketing. To add anything else to our already overflowing plates will make us ineffective. But small businesses, regardless of their industry, should add a blog as the central component of their content marketing activities because creating relevant content for your target audience and optimizing it for search engine visibility is too important to ignore.

Optimizing Your Web Content

For the sake of simplicity, let’s view search engine optimization as two components: what you do on your website to help search engines and what you do outside of your website to build quality links. Optimizing your content for each page and post of your website is essential to helping your site get found.

Good content marketing requires that you understand your target customer’s needs and then develop content to help them discover why they should buy your products and services. Effective use of keywords in content marketing makes your content more relevant to your target while helping search engines optimize the content.

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin makes content optimization simpler. The plugin makes analysis more visual, helping you optimize your pages and posts. If you are just learning how to optimize your pages and posts, this plugin will help. Here are some nice features that I’d like to point out.

Yoast SEO – Guided On Page Optimization

One thing I’ve always liked about Yoast SEO is that it tells you where to focus in order to best optimize each piece of content of your website. By selecting one keyword on which to base your writing, you create better, more relevant content for your reader while helping the search engines do their jobs.

The plugin gives you three tabs to help with the SEO process. The first, shown below, enables you to select your focus keyword phrase.  The SEO Title (what appears at the tab of your browser) and Meta Description create the snippet that will appear in the search engine results pages. Craft both in a way that attracts searchers to click through to your website.

Adding the focus keyword phrase enables the plugin to give you information on whether you have used the keyword in the right places.

The SEO analysis tab highlights key optimization areas and provides insight into how well your page is optimized. The red, yellow and green icons indicate whether you have met the suggested criteria for well optimized web pages. Don’t stress over not having all criteria in the green. Sometimes proper grammar is more important than satisfying SEO criteria.

In the Advanced tab, you can set various index and follow options to guide the search engines. Mostly you can leave the settings as defined in the general plugin settings, but these are good to have if you need to create an exception.

Visual Triggers to Keep Your SEO on Track

In the new release, there are now more visual triggers to help you get the most from your content. In the top right of your WordPress block editor window is a little indicator that is red, yellow or green depending on whether the page has met the criteria.

I really like the the information listed in the pages and post WordPress dashboard. The plugin adds three columns to show the Title, Meta Description and the Focus Keyword that you used. This is a great reminder in case you forget to optimize the page or post. If the area is blank or the SEO indicator is gray, you need to do some work.

The plugin also adds four columns with the SEO and readability rating, outbound links and internal links so you can tell if you’ve done all you can for on-page optimization.

All of these new reminders keep SEO very visible. Optimize each post as you write it.  Review pages for visibility and update when needed. Check your list of pages and see which ones you need to work on.

On page SEO is important but in my experience, it is too easy to overlook because of all the details. Most small business owners have enough on their task lists and SEO is one that never rises to the top. However, this plugin makes it easy to see if your content is optimized. Look at SEO as a challenge to turn your indicator from red to green.