WordPress SEO by Yoast – Why I Love It

I’ve waited too long to start using the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin.

Now that I’ve used it, I wish I would’ve got on board sooner. I’ve used the All in one SEO plugin on many websites, but plan to use WordPress SEO by Yoast from now on.

High Praise

I’ve heard people talking about how good the plugin is for SEO in WordPress websites. I’m starting to see why.

There are many options that can be set, including setting variables for default titles and META description values for pages, posts, and custom post types.
For example, here are values I’ve set for all pages, posts and custom post types. This will display the Title, separator, followed by the sitename.

%%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

The %%sep%% is a separator that you can set in the WordPress SEO plugin settings. In my case I’m using | as a separator.

These default values can be overridden in any page or post, but it’s great to have default values that will work in most cases, saving time in having to edit each individual pages SEO values.

My Favorite Part

When editing a page or post, there is an SEO section in the WordPress editor that displays:

• Snippet Preview
  This shows how your link will be displayed in google search results. It displays the link, and below it, the description. If you’re using the Focus keyword, those keywords will be in bold.
• Focus Keyword
  I love the focus keyword tool that is available for any post or page. When you’re adding or editing a post or page, there’s an option that allows you to enter a target keyword or keyword phrase. It’ll then tell you if you’re using your target keyword in key areas or your content.

  Here’s an example of a page where I want to use focus keyword phase Michigan Web Designer.

  Focus keyword usage
  Your focus keyword was found in:
  Article Heading: Yes (1)
  Page title: No
  Page URL: No
  Content: Yes (1)
  Meta description: No

  The result shows that I’m not using my keyword in the Page title, Page URL or Meta description. It also displays the number of times that your keyword appears.
  I like the visual results, so I can easily resolve this, and the results will change as I update the page or post.

• SEO Title
  This displays your title of your page or post. There is also a message below that will show you a warning if your title is too long.
• Meta Description
  This displays your Meta Description as well as the length. This gives you a character count so you’ll know if you’ve gone beyond the recommended 156 characters.

There is also a page analysis option that lists three different types of helpful messages: warnings, notices and messages. This provides helpful information warning you if you’re not using your focus keywords properly, are missing alt tags on images, or if you haven’t included a META description, among others.

Additional Features

You can integrate social media Twitter, Facebook and google+ accounts, add XML Sitemaps, enhance permalinks, and export your settings, to name a few.

More to Explore

This tool makes it fun to optimize a website.

They also have in-depth documentation and SEO articles at Yoast.com.

Next I’ll try some of the advanced features I haven’t needed yet.

If you want better SEO results, and need a tool that’s easy to use, you might want to consider WordPress SEO by Yoast.