All of our sites come launched with the SEO Yoast Plugin. We do so because it is a great indicator of whether you are doing a good job of crafting good copy for your website – copy which you will put you in a better position to rank well for those key terms which are important to you and your business.
First of though, Yoast SEO does not help you identify the good or bad keyterms for your business. Google Keyword Planner can help you there – but mostly you need to understand what your clients are actually looking for – how do they talk about the services you provide?
But, once you feel like you have a good understanding of which key term you’d like to rank for on each page, you can start to utilize the tool.
Once the tool is installed you will find it below your text editor in the backend of your site.
How to use Yoast SEO
The tool has four tabs, we will mainly look at the General tab in this short guide.
The General Tab consists of a Snippet Preview, Focus Keyword section, SEO title section and a Meta description section.
The Snippet Preview shows you how this particular site will show in search results on Google. The focus keyword area is where you enter the keyword which you want to focus on on this site. Once entered, the tool will let you know how many of the key SEO boxes you have ticked. Don’t be a stuffer though. You can easily be tempted to try and get those numbers up, but remember: you are writing for people. And we like variety, we like a bit of copy flair – we don’t like to see the same thing repeated over and over again.
The SEO title is where you shape the title that will show up in the Google Search results. Here you have a really good opportunity to tell the search engines what your page is all about, but also real people in. Try to aim to get your company name in the title as well. But start with the title of the page – as an example: Free Phone Calls To The UK – TeleBusiness.com.
Make sure you check that the title isn’t too long (the tool will let you know as well).
The meta description is another key part to what makes this tool so great. Here you can go into a bit more detail about what is on this particular page. It’s another opportunity to utilize your key search term and maybe use a call to action to bring people in. You are however limited to 156 characters.
IMPORTANT!!!
All of your SEO titles should be different and relevant to the individual page – the same goes for the Meta descriptions.
If you want to get a bit more detail about how your page is performing, go to the Page Analysis tab. Her you will see information such as your Flesch score (readability), amount of outbound links and other key factors to ensure good SEO.