Yoast SEO General Functions

What is the Yoast SEO plugin?

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that improves your website’s rankings on search engines, by helping you optimize your site’s content and keywords. A lot of what Yoast SEO does is automated, but still needs your input and some planning. 

How does Yoast SEO work?

Once installed to your WordPress site, the Yoast SEO plugin will appear on each of the pages and posts you create. Yoast SEO analyzes the page’s content and provides suggestions on how to improve it.

The plugin gives you a score, tells you what problems there are and how to improve your content for SEO.

The Key Benefits and Tools of Yoast SEO

Whether you have the free or paid version of this plugin, there is no shortage of features to learn how to use. Here are the key features and benefits you need to know about:

The Focus Keyphrase

This is the keyword or keywords you’d like that particular page on your website to rank for. Your focus keyphrase should come out of your keyword research.

If you are working on a page on your website for volunteers, your focus keyword will likely be “volunteer”. But the more specific you can be, the better chance you’ll have of showing up higher in the search engine results. We call these niche keyphrases, like “online volunteer opportunity”.

Google Preview

This section displays a preview of how your website would show up in search results. By clicking Edit Snippet, you can customize the SEO Title and Meta Description of that page. The tool helps you focus on writing with your keywords in mind.

Readability

Search engines don’t just prioritize keywords. They are focused on generating the best possible and relevant results for the user’s search terms. That means your page also has to read well. Yoast SEO points out the problems, opportunities for improvement, and provides links for how to address those issues.

Social Media

When you share a post on social media linking to a page on your website, there’s often a preview of that link. It includes a photo, or feature image, the title of the post, and a description. Yoast SEO (Premium) pulls in the title and description from the SEO tab of the plugin unless you want to customize the preview for social media. The plugin allows you to write a title, description and upload an image, specifically for social media.

What is RSS feed in WordPress?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – a web feed format for publishing frequent updates of site content such as news, blog posts, etc. … WordPress gives the option to easily add RSS feeds to your website.

Yoast SEO allows you to automatically add content to your RSS feed. In short, these RSS settings exist because, unfortunately, there are scraper sites that republish content from other sites without their permission. If they republish your content, they usually don’t link back to your site. This leads to duplicate content problems in the search results, and because of this, a scraper site with a bit more authority than your blog would simply outrank you with your own content.

10 Most Important Functions of Yoast SEO for WordPress

1.  Generates XML Sitemaps

Proper organization is a must for SEO, and an integral part of that, is an XML sitemap. Upon installation, Yoast SEO auto-generates one, and consistently updates it when you create new content. You can easily change your XML settings by going under SEO > XML Sitemaps in your WordPress admin dashboard.

2.  Automatically Submits XML Sitemaps to Google/Other Search Engines

Also referred to as pinging, Yoast SEO automatically sends the updated sitemaps to Google and Bing. The point of this is to help search engines quickly add new content, and keep other indexed pieces of content up-to-date if you change them. Under the XML sitemap options, you can also choose to have it ping Yahoo, and Ask.com every time you post a new piece of content.

This plugin can create sitemaps for the various sections of your website. That makes it easier for search engines to understand your site structure. 

To make your content visible for search engines just:

• prioritize your most important content
• determine what goes into your sitemap
• allow search engines to quickly discover your content.

3.  Allows You To Create Custom Meta Header/Description

Often, a headline that would make a perfect email subject line for your subscribers, makes a terrible headline for SEO purposes. With Yoast’s plugin, you simply write two headlines, one for people, and one for search engines. You should also add a custom meta description for your content as well. Not only can this help with targeting the right keywords, you can also hand-craft an incredibly enticing description that makes more people actually choose your page when browsing the search results. You can access both of these things in the SEO box directly under the normal post/page editor.

4.  Check Focus Keywords

You can easily and quickly check that you’re not going under, or overboard with keyword density, among other factors, and get reminded that you need to fix your page/post urls/slugs, and other things that impact your on-page SEO. It can be a great overall reminder that keeps you on track post after post. You simply enter your focus keyword in the normal SEO box under the post/page WYSIWIG editor, and see what pops up under it.

5.  Lets You Add Page Redirects Easily

If you update a post or page of content on your website, but your old one is still receiving the most traffic, it can be a great idea to add in a simple redirect to the new version. This can indirectly help your SEO by providing your visitors with more up to date/better/clearer information, possibly leading to more sharing and general user engagement.

6.  Lets You Add Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs visually demonstrate the hierarchy of a site, and the specific area of a site you’re currently visiting, path or History-based, and attribute-Based. We use breadcrumbs here at WPExplorer, so you can see an example of how this works by scrolling to the top of this very post. (Or check out the example below, taken from one of the posts on this very blog.)

Not only can breadcrumbs help your visitors navigate your website, but it can also help Google(and other search engines) figure out if/how related your website is to a specific topic or keyword. You can enable breadcrumbs under the internal linking options. And while you have a lot of freedom to make edits, it is usually a good idea to keep it nice and simple, keeping it understandable for both people and bots alike.

7. Allows You To Change Permalinks

Under the permalink options, you can access a couple of different functions that can be very useful for the right website. This is where you can manage the URL or slug for posts or pages.

Redirect Ugly URL to clean permalinks.

This function helps make up for slightly wrong links to your pages from other sites, or from your own pages. If somebody accidentally puts in a number, or something excessive at the end of a page URL, it will automatically turn back into the clean/correct URL. (F.ex: http://website.com/page2/291 -> http://website.com/page2)

Important: If you use any sort of e-commerce plugin, or your track the origin of sales by using campaign tags in the URL, you should not activate this no matter how many ugly links you discover to your pages.

8. Automatically Remove Stop Words From Slugs

As the name suggests, this function removes stop words from slugs. This basically means that even if you don’t type in a specific slug for every post, the stop words(that Google recommend keeping out of the URL as they don’t offer any meaning) will be automatically removed. As little things like this can be easy to forget, it can be very useful to keep it activated.

9. Helps You Bulk Edit Titles/Descriptions

Let’s say Yoast SEO came slow to the party, and many of your popular posts and pages were created before you installed the plugin, and have no specific SEO title or description, game over right? I mean, going in and editing one and one page/post is just too time consuming right?

Thankfully the plugin offers a bulk title editor, and a bulk description editor. Enabling you to mass-edit titles and descriptions of your older posts and pages with ease. Of course, if your backlog of content is too extensive, trying to do this for every piece of content might turn into a full-time job for three people, so only fixing up high priority pages is a great idea.

In Yoast SEO, you can use variables to set templates for your SEO titles and meta descriptions. After setting a template, the plugin will generate an SEO title and a meta description following that template for each of your posts and pages!

10. Structured data with Schema.org

Structured data in the form of Schema.org is important for your SEO. Correctly implementing data might not give you better rankings, but it will indirectly make your site a better search result.

Enhanced search results give searchers an easier way to pick a result from the list of links. If your listing is rich and your page does what your listing promises, you are a valid result for the customer, leading to a lower bounce rate. A lower bounce rate tells Google that your site is a well-regarded result that promises and delivers.

Rich results are the extra pieces of information and interactive features shown on a search result page. In addition to the regular black lines of meta description text, you can enhance a search result with product information like prices or reviews or extra navigational tools like breadcrumbs or site search.