Yoast SEO’s WordPress Plugin is a powerful tool that can help website owners drive traffic to their site. Yoast makes it easy to optimize a website for search engines, making the site more visible to anyone searching online. The easier it is for search engines to find a website, the eas
ier it is for the website’s target audience to find it also—this makes installing Yoast a no-brainer for people looking to increase their site’s traffic.
Yoast SEO is intuitive and easy to use, which is one reason why it’s so popular among WordPress site owners. However, if you’re new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), you might still be getting your head around certain aspects of it and, therefore, not using Yoast to its total capacity.
This guide will give you everything you need to maximize your Google rankings using the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.
Using Yoast to Maximize Google Rankings
Use Yoast to help you do these seven things with your website and watch your Google rankings start to climb!
Focus on Content
When it comes down to it, if you want your WordPress site to rank well on Google, it needs to engage your audience. How can it do this? By providing them with content that is useful in some way, perhaps by being:
- Informative
- Entertaining
- Inspirational
Well-written content helps Google find your site and keeps people reading your pages. The following are some of the most important factors to keep in mind when creating content for your WordPress website.
Readability
Your content must be well-written and easy to understand if you want people to engage with it.
That means ensuring your copy is error-free, grammatically correct, and well structured. It also means content that is easily skimmable for today’s short attention spans. Skimmable content with keyword-friendly headers is also easier for search engines to understand and rank.
Check the readability of your content with Yoast’s readability analysis, which will determine how easy your content is to understand and suggest needed improvements.
Keyword Optimization
If you know a little bit about SEO, you’re probably aware of the importance of using keywords in your content. Optimizing keywords helps Google understand what your page is about so that it can direct interested people to it.
You don’t want to overuse keywords, though, or your content will sound repetitive and not very interesting to read. Plus, if Google thinks you’ve overstuffed your site with keywords, it can hurt your rankings, so you want to strike a balance.
A major feature of the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is an SEO content analysis tool that helps site owners with keyword optimization and allows you to create content that’s optimized with keywords while still sounding natural.
Content Organization
While including strong content on your website is important, the way you organize it will also affect your Google rankings. The Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin is especially useful in helping you avoid:
- Orphan content: Orphaned content is content that’s sitting on your site all alone, without any other pages linking to it. If the content isn’t important enough for your other pages to link to it, Google will see it as not being important enough for it to rank highly. The Yoast orphaned content finder will flag any orphaned content, so you can either combine it with other pages or work on creating some internal links to it.
- Keyword cannibalization: Keyword cannibalization occurs when you compete with yourself for the same keywords by trying to rank for the same keyword on multiple pages. Yoast’s SEO analysis will let you know if this is happening on your site so you can fix the problem.
Optimize Your Site’s Background Elements
When it comes to designing a website, more people think about things like color schemes and the type of content to include. However, numerous elements of a website are unnoticed by visitors but have a large impact on Google rankings. A few of these elements include:
- Permalink
- Page title
- Meta description
- Images
- Schema structured data
- Breadcrumbs
Yoast makes it easy to tweak each one of these elements to improve SEO, even if you have no experience with coding or other more technical aspects of websites. You can adjust your site’s permalink through the Yoast redirect manager; you can get to the other elements by going to SEO > search appearance.
Improve Your Site’s Structure
The more organized your site’s structure is, the easier it is for visitors and Google to navigate it. As you might have guessed, a site that’s easy for Google to navigate will rank more highly.
How can you optimize your site structure for SEO?
- Create cornerstone articles that other pages link to.
- Utilize hierarchical post organization to prevent keyword cannibalization.
- Make use of related posts to keep visitors engaged and help Google learn what your site is about.
- Remove old content to reduce clutter (and redirect the links using the Yoast redirect manager feature).
Yoast’s SEO analysis feature can give you a clear idea of how well your site is organized as well as the tools you need to easily make needed adjustments to optimize your site’s structure.
Monitor Search Google Console
Google Search Console is an invaluable tool for website owners. It monitors your website performance and lets you know whether any issues are affecting your SEO. If you’re serious about improving your Google rankings, signing up for a free Google Search Console account is a must.
Yoast SEO integrates seamlessly with Google Search Console so you can monitor your website’s performance from one spot.
Final Thoughts
Installing the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is one of the easiest ways to optimize your website for search engines like Google, increase traffic to your site, and ultimately grow your business. However, marketing involves more than your website; if you’re looking for a well-rounded digital marketing strategy that will scale your business, we can help.
Contact us to get started.
