SEO Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important today than ever before. New trends (e.g., the rise of voice search, the machine learning revolution) mean that if you want to stay afloat today, you need to up your SEO game.
One way to do that is by using SEO tools. SEO tools provide data and alerts about the overall health and success of your website. They help uncover areas of opportunity and identify weaknesses or issues that may prevent you from ranking and earning visibility in the SERPs.

How to edit snippet with Yoast SEO

This is a quick tutorial on updating the Yoast SEO Snippet so that you can set your title and description for Google to pick up the next time it indexes your page.

• Open WordPress and rest your mouse pointer over “Pages” found in the list on the left of the screen. Click on “All Pages” in the sub-window.
• This will call up a list of your website’s pages.
• Click “Edit” under the page you want to amend.
• About ½ way down the page you will find the Yoast SEO text box
• Click “Edit Snippet”. This will open up the Yoast SEO Snippet for you to edit.

• The SEO Title (the section above in blue) and Meta Description boxes (the section above in black) will open for you to edit, as shown below.
• Remember that it is important that your SEO title includes your focus keyword as well as the name of your company. A great Yoast feature and guide includes a bar underneath the title box which starts off as orange, as you type and once your title is a sufficient length, it turns green. If it is too long, it turns red.
• The meta description is equally important and should not be a one liner. This text box should contain a dynamic, readable description of the SEO title, including keywords.

• Once you are happy with your SEO title and meta description, click “Update” on the right of the page (near the top).
• Your updated page will assist search engines like Google to find your page and hopefully rank it higher on its results pages.
• That is the Yoast SEO Snippet completed.

Choosing Your Focus Keyword using Yoast SEO

Your focus keyword is the keyword or phrase that you most want your page to be ranked, i.e., the words or phrase that best describes your page.  Yoast SEO will evaluate the page’s content and give feedback on how to improve the focus keyword you type into the field.

The following two questions can help you decide what your focus keywords are:

1. What are people searching for when they should be finding me?
2. What question does my product or service answer, which problem does it solve?

The Yoast SEO plugin helps you optimize your post for your chosen keyword.

Furthermore, the tool, “Yoast Suggest”, helps you find related keywords which will give you some idea of the search behaviour of users.  The results of “Yoast Suggest” are based on current queries users have.  Therefore, it makes sense to monitor it for important keywords.

Semrush: SEO Writing Assistant Tool

SEO Writing Assistant created by SEMRush helps content creators to ensure their texts are unique and written in an SEO-friendly style by providing recommendations for content optimization. These recommendations based on best-performing articles in Google’s top-10 for given keywords in a given location.

Some key features:

• Checks the general article quality calculated on the basis of such metrics as readability, words, target keywords.
• Evaluates your text’s difficulty based on recommended Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score.
• Shows recommendations regarding the given keywords, their volume and difficulty.
• Shows semantically related keywords, which should also be added to your text.
• Optimize your title and see whether titles comply with Google’s guidelines
• Identify the tone of voice of your content piece – casual, neutral or formal

How to use:

1. Enter your target keywords and get a list of semantically related terms to include in your content
2. Make sure you don’t overuse certain keywords
3. Get reminders to add alt attributes for your images
4. Ensure your links are not broken