Yoast SEO Content Functions

How to Use Yoast SEO for Content Optimization

Once installed, the free version of Yoast SEO adds an analysis box to every page and post on your website for which it’s enabled. This box is visible on the backend, where you edit each piece of content.

The Yoast box has three tabs: SEO, Readability, and Social. This article is going to focus on the SEO and Social tabs only, because a) is about content optimization, and b) it’s plenty long without getting into the readability assessment.

The SEO tab presents your scores using the familiar green light/red light system.

It also adds high-level Yoast information to the main view of your posts, pages, or any other content types for which it’s enabled. This includes the Yoast SEO score, readability score, number of links to other internal pages, SEO title, and focus keyphrase.

Before you start chasing down those green lights from Yoast, remember to always put the reader first. Don’t add more exact keywords to your copy if it makes the sentences awkward, and don’t cram keywords into headings where they don’t make sense!

The smartest SEO is producing content that’s relevant, useful, and enjoyable for your target audience to read.

The Yoast SEO Analysis

To get a Yoast SEO analysis, you first need to set your focus keyphrase. This is the search query for which you want this content to rank. Hopefully you’ve done your research, and it’s relevant to your audience.

Now you’ll see an overall green, orange, or red score expressed by an emoji face, plus rows of recommendations and comments on your optimization problems, improvements, and ‘good results.’

Copy Optimizations

Yoast SEO is obsessed with keywords! There are multiple analysis results based on your keyphrase, which is why we’re starting there. Keywords used to be a huge deal in SEO. You were meant to use the exact keywords for which you wanted to rank, over and over again.

Search engines are smarter now. Keywords still have value, but Google understands natural language and synonyms. It’s a good practice to include variations on your target keywords in any page or post.

This also means that you should use the Yoast SEO keyword recommendations as guidelines, because they’re hinged on keywords having more weight as a ranking factor.

SEO Analysis

The SEO analysis in Yoast SEO uses the focus keyphrase you set to check if you use this phrase in places where it should appear. For instance, this might be the title of your post, the URL, or the meta description. In addition, it also checks if you use the keyphrase enough in your main content and warns you if you overdo it. 

There are over fifteen different checks that help you get the insights you need to make the content ready to go. For instance, it checks if you’ve added internal and external links or if you’ve added relevant alt text to your images. Plus, it counts the number of words in your article to prevent you from posting thin content — i.e. content without much value to search engines.

SEO analysis is one of the most essential aspects of Yoast SEO which it uses to improve the SEO of your website. Once you install and activate the plugin, you’ll be provided with a meta box on every page and post of your website while editing it. Here, you can add a focus keyword and the plugin will analyze it with an SEO score and suggestions in the SEO tab.

The SEO analysis is done by determining various elements of your pages or posts. They include keyphrase length, keyword density, outbound and internal links, meta description length, image alt attributes, content length, and more.

Once it’s analyzed based on all the necessary factors, you will get an SEO score for your page or post content. The SEO score determines how much potential the particular page or post has to rank in search engines based on 3 different colors:

• Red: Needs Improvement (Worst result)
• Orange: OK (Can be improved for a better result)
• Green: Good (Best result)

You’ll be also provided with suggestions as well as the positive points for your SEO here. If the whole content has the SEO score of “Red” or “Orange”, you can use the suggestions and recommendations to make it “Green”. 

Even the suggestions have the same color markings and rankings as that of the SEO score i.e., red, orange, and green. You can easily determine how much improvement is needed on every aspect of your page or post regarding SEO from here. 

Furthermore, your ultimate goal to get the best results out of the SEO analysis should be to make every suggestion point and SEO score “Green”. It might be quite difficult to do it entirely. 

Full Language Support

Does Yoast SEO recognize my language?

Even the best content writers need some helpful tools to improve their online texts to make them readable. But, most of the software is geared towards the English language. So, what if you want to write in another language? You’ve come to the right place! Yoast SEO offers readability and SEO analysis for a host of other languages!

The benefits of language recognition in Yoast SEO

• Write readable texts in your native language
• Use multiple forms of your keyphrase, in your mother tongue
• Link your posts together to create an outstanding site structure

Rank high in the search results with your chosen keyphrase

Users search for keyphrases in Google. Your content needs to be the best result for that keyphrase in order to rank. Of course, it’s not as simple as just using that keyphrase. To rank, you need to place it in all the right spots through the text, and for instance, be careful not to use too much or too little of it. Yoast SEO helps you by analyzing your keyphrase use. The best part? The plugin can do that in almost any language! Yoast SEO can even recognize your keyphrase in three right-to-left languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi!

✔ Available in: All left-to-right languages, as well as Arabic,  Hebrew, and Farsi (Persian).

Make your texts engaging and more natural with different forms of your keyword

Yoast SEO Premium supports word form recognition in various languages. That means that Yoast SEO can recognize your keyword’s singular and plural forms (example: cookie, cookies). It also recognizes different forms of words (bake, baking, baked, bakes). That is important because it allows you to write engaging texts for your audience. Search engines also appreciate it a lot if you don’t over-optimize for just one form of your keyword.

✔ Available in: English, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish, Czech, Hebrew, Arabic, Slovak, Greek, and Japanese.

Write readable texts that both your audience and search engines appreciate

Yoast SEO analyzes the readability of your texts by looking at transition words, use of passive voice, reading ease (with the Flesch reading ease score), sentence length, and sentence beginnings. When all of these aspects are done right, you get smoothly readable texts. You don’t have to wonder if your text is clear and readable. We give you the feedback, so you know right away! 

✔ Available in: English, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Czech, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Norwegian, and Slovak. For Hebrew, Polish, Swedish, and Arabic, and Hungarian, we currently do not analyze the Flesch reading ease score.

Link your posts together and make it easy for search engines to find them 

Words make up your texts and help people and search engines understand their topic. They also help Yoast SEO Premium analyze your content and determine how posts, pages, categories, and tags related to each other. With our state-of-the-art internal linking tool, you can easily link your related posts and pages and do wonders for your site structure, so all your pages end up in the search engines! 

✔ Available in: English, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Hebrew, Czech, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Japanese.

Readability analysis

The Readability Analysis in Yoast SEO Helps You

• Scans your text and gives helpful feedback to improve it
• Check for the use of passive voice, transition words, and more
• Flesch reading ease score tells how hard to read the content is

Flesch Reading Ease Score Indicates Complexity

The Flesch Reading Ease score is a tried and tested feature in many readability analyses. It is a way of seeing how readable your text is on a scale from 0-100. Different levels stand for different reading experiences, with 0-30 for academics and 90-100 for 11-year olds. It looks at two aspects of your text: how the amount of words relates to the amount of sentence and how the amount of syllables relates to the number of words.

If you do not use too many difficult words and keep your sentences short, the check will pass. That means you will get a green bullet if your text’s reading ease score is higher than 60. Why this number? Because, for web copy, reading ease of 60-70 is considered acceptable. Translated into simpler terms means that a 13-15-year-old should easily understand a good web text.

Passive Voice Check Helps You Write in The Active Voice

Passive voice makes your sentences wordier and complex. It makes your writing seem more distant and cold. The passive voice uses a sentence structure that requires more cognitive effort. Your reader will spend valuable working memory on making sense of the sentence. This decreases the likelihood of you getting your message across. That’s why we advise writers to try and write in the active voice.

Checks Sentence and Paragraph Length

In written texts, long sentences such as this can make it hard to keep track of everything that’s going on and, therefore, should not be something you should keep using at all times. Short sentences can be powerful. They are easy to grasp. Of course, it’s best to mix both longer and shorter sentences to create a text rhythm. The readability analysis in Yoast SEO checks your content for long sentences and points them out for you to fix. Also, Yoast SEO checks for overlong paragraphs. Long paragraphs for a wall of text that might be hard for users to conquer.

Enhance Readability by Adding Transition Words

Transition words can really tie a text together. For instance, these words, like, however, therefore, and besides, can connect different parts of the sentence naturally. This makes for a much more natural piece of text. Using transition words, you can better structure your text, making it easier to understand for humans and machines. A well-structured text helps to attract readers to your blog and contributes to SEO!

A Google Preview

What is Yoast’s Google Preview?

Yoast’s Google preview, formerly known as the snippet preview, is a feature of the Yoast SEO plugin. It allows you to preview and edit what your page or post will look like in Google’s search results. It has a mobile and desktop view and shows elements like the slug, title and meta description. In this preview, you can edit those elements to make sure your site looks good in the search results.

Where Do You Find Yoast’s Google Preview?

In Yoast SEO, there are two ways to preview your snippet: 

• Yoast SEO sidebar 
• Yoast SEO meta box at the end of your post (in editing mode).

The Yoast SEO Sidebar

You can activate the sidebar by clicking on the Yoast icon on the top right of your screen. In the sidebar, you’ll see the “Google preview” tab:

A modal will pop up and show you a preview of your post or page in Google’s search results, where you will be able to edit your snippet:

Yoast’s Google preview as part of the Yoast SEO sidebar modal

The Yoast SEO Meta Box

You can also get a Google preview of your post below your post in the Yoast SEO meta box. Just scroll down in your post until you see the Yoast SEO meta box. There, it’ll be the first thing you see:

Yoast’s Google preview as part of the Yoast SEO meta box

Mobile Result or Desktop Result

In the screenshots above, you might have noticed you can choose between two versions of the snippet: the mobile snippet and the desktop snippet. Since Google presents the results differently on a desktop and a mobile device, it makes sense to check both previews before you publish a post.

The Components of The Snippet Preview

In our Google or snippet preview, you’ll see the following elements:

• The SEO title
• The meta description
• The URL, slug or breadcrumb (or a combination)

In the mobile preview, we’ve added a favicon and image too. Here, we’ll discuss these elements step by step. Please note that Google regularly experiments with elements like favicons, breadcrumbs and images, so the preview might slightly differ from what you see in the actual search results.

Innovative Schema Blocks

The Yoast SEO Schema.org Output

Yoast SEO outputs some core Schema.org pieces on every page. Some additional pieces get added based on different scenarios:

• When the website represents a person
• On single posts 
• When a page contains a HowTo block
• When a page contains an FAQ block 

What Do You Need to Do?

The plugin does a lot of the work behind the scenes, so you will not be required to do any coding. However, to let Yoast SEO properly implement Schema.org on your site, you will need to adjust a few settings and provide some information. 

1. Configure Your Search Appearance and Social Settings

In the Yoast SEO Search Appearance Settings, you can select whether your site represents a person or an organization. With that information, Yoast SEO will be able to output the correct structured data. Follow the steps in the help article on the Yoast SEO Search Appearance settings to configure your website’s settings. 

Yoast SEO uses different profiles for outputting the correct structured data

Make sure to also add your social profiles in the Yoast SEO Social settings. The plugin will use that information to let search engines know which profiles are associated with your site.

2. Set your defaults and use the Schema tab in the Yoast SEO meta box or the Yoast SEO sidebar

When you use Yoast SEO the plugin automatically describes your pages with WebPage schema and your Posts with Article schema. You can change these defaults in the Search Appearance settings of Yoast SEO. But, you can also decide how we describe the content of each individual post or page with the Schema tab in the Yoast SEO meta box or the Yoast SEO sidebar.

3. Use the HowTo and FAQ Yoast structured data blocks

If you want to get rich results for your HowTo or FAQ pages, all you need to do is use the Yoast SEO HowTo or FAQ structured data blocks. Yoast SEO will automatically add the appropriate Schema.org markup corresponding to the blocks. 

Implementing Schema.org markup on your own and integrating with other plugins and themes

Although Yoast SEO outputs a large structured data graph, it does not currently support all content types. If you want to add your own pieces of Schema read the integration guidelines.