There are thousands of websites competing to gain those coveted top positions in search results on WordPress – widely considered to be the most SEO-friendly site out there. This makes it pretty challenging when it comes to the search result performance of a new website of any small business.
Employing an SEO plugin will help you optimize your website more easily, helping with needed details like managing your keywords, creating optimum content, using webmaster tools, and more. We recommend Yoast SEO for WordPress as one of the best.
Yoast SEO brings a lot of optimization features with it. You can enjoy built-in content analysis, meta keyword and description management, rich snippets, and social features, just to name a few.
Some of the features, pricing, and support options of Yoast SEO plugin:
- Optimum Content. Your Yoast SEO plugin adds a meta box on the “post-edit” screen, which allows you to add meta title and description for your posts, as well as to choose a focus keyword. Once this keyword is chosen, Yoast will analyze the content of your post against your chosen keyword and assign it an SEO score. It will also recommend steps you can take to improve the score.
- Readability. Yoast SEO provides a built-in readability score analysis, which scores your content based on its readability. This will allow you to edit your content accordingly.
- Restricts search engines. Yoast SEO will allow you to restrict engines by adding no-index to any pages that you don’t want to get indexed and will enable you to hide the author archives on single-author blogs, tags, archive pages, etc.
- Sitemaps. You won’t need to install yet another plugin for XML Sitemaps, either. Yoast automatically generates those for your site, submitting them to Google and Bing. Integrated within your Yoast SEO dashboard you will now also find Search Console, which allows you to see how your site is performing in search results.
- Content scrapers. Many websites face problems with “scraper websites” – these websites are supposed to curate content from around the web, using RSS feeds with scripts that automatically fetch content from other websites. This can be detrimental to your website since these search engines can often start ranking those sites ahead of yours. Yoast SEO can solve this issue by adding a link to your individual article with every RSS feed; this informs search engines of the location of the original article, beating scrapers at their own game.
- Robots. Yoast SEO includes a built-in tool that will allow you to see both your robot.txt and .htaccess files, and you’ll be able to edit those files right from your dashboard.
- Pricing. Yoast SEO is a plugin that is free to use, with no requirement to buy a premium version. Consequently, it is in use on millions of websites around the world!
One thing you will need to keep in mind, though, is that it does not come with support, but there is extensive documentation, as well as tutorials, for this plugin. You can find on-screen instruction for every feature in the admin area, and concepts and features are explained on the author’s website. As one of the most-used WordPress plugins, it’s a breeze to find the guidance and help you need.
Here at Piccolo, we are happy to recommend Yoast SEO plugin as a complete package that outperforms all the other WordPress SEO plugins out there. With its onboarding tour and comprehensive instructions built right in, your small business should be using Yoast SEO for WordPress!
