There are a number of different SEO techniques that you can employ within your business’ online strategy, providing great benefits for the performance of your company website. Here is where on-page optimisation comes into play.

If working with little knowledge of SEO, or how to optimise your website for search engines and users, it can be hard to achieve the rankings that you deserve. However if your website is built on WordPress, optimisation has never been easier! WordPress offer a plugin, made available to all users, called Yoast SEO. Its free version alone is highly valuable and can provide a plethora of incredible features to improve your SEO.

With the help of the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily and quickly optimise your entire site with the many features available within the tool. The Yoast SEO plugin gives you real-time insights into your webpages and any crucial elements that could be improved that you otherwise may have missed!

There is a premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin which gives you access to further features; however the free version offers you all the basics you need to ensure your website is optimised with SEO in mind.

Free Yoast SEO Features:

Social media is integrated into Yoast

By going to SEO and then selecting “Social,” users of Yoast SEO can provide Google with the URLs of their company profiles across all well-known social networks. Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are the three most widely used social networking platforms that you may link with your website.

Social media features are also available in the content analysis meta box. You may customise how your material displays on social media networks under the “Social” option. You have the option to change the title, add a meta description, and upload a unique image.

 

Meta Robots

With Yoast SEO you can also manage your meta robots by identifying pages you would like to be kept hidden and out of the index, as well as pages you would like to appear in search results. Your meta robots settings can be found under the Advanced tab in the meta data box on every page of your website. However, you should first define whether you would like to use the meta robots tag or a robots.txt file.

XML Sitemap

Google can find the pages on your website faster with the help of an XML sitemap. No matter what SEO tactics you employ, they won’t help you if search engines aren’t able to find your material.

XML Sitemap features are available built-in to the Yoast SEO plugin. Users can create an automatic sitemap that is updated each time a new page or post is published. XML Sitemaps can be enabled by going to SEO and then selecting “XML Sitemap.” Just click this box to select it.
Yoast SEO notifies the search engines each time you publish fresh material after the Sitemap capability is turned on.

Canonical URLs & Breadcrumbs

The Yoast SEO plugin automatically defines every page you create as the canonical version, however, it is easy to add the canonical URL of a page into the meta data box in the field ‘Canonical’. The Yoast SEO plugin removes the hassle of tampering with code, simply pasting in the canonical URL and updating the page – it’s as easy as it gets! As well as this, in the same meta data box in the Breadcrumbs Title field you can define what you would like the breadcrumb to appear as for every category, subcategory, page and post.

Verification

It has never been easier to monitor and track your website than with Yoast SEO. In the General Settings of the plugin under the Webmaster Tools tab you can add in your verification code to verify your ownership of the domain and begin gaining valuable information about your website using Google Search Console. However, you will still have to manually insert the Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager code within the code itself as Yoast have yet to add this functionality.

Yoast SEO Premium Features

There are many benefits of Yoast SEO Premium:

  • It is frequently updated, and the community is so large that it is simple to obtain recommendations, advice, and guidelines to make the most of the plugin.
  • Since the premium version has some more features, it can be fixed by using other free plugins.
  • It incorporates functions from some of the most widely used plugins, including RSS footer and Robots Meta.
  • With Yoast SEO, you can provide each post in your RSS feed a backlink to your own website.
  • Your SEO ranking is aided by it.
  • For premium customers, it provides email assistance, while for free users, it provides a WordPress help forum.
  • To improve SEO visibility, Yoast offers a number of premium modules with premium SEO plugin.

By installing the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily set a template for all your title tags and meta descriptions site-wide, this will not only save you time but also help keep your webpages consistent. With Yoast SEO installed you will see a meta data box when you are editing any of your webpages, this shows you how your webpage will appear in search results.

If you would like to break away from your template, you can easily edit your title, description and URL path to match your requirements. An additional feature in the meta data box is that you can enter a ‘focus keyword’ for each page and the plugin will analyse your content for that keyword, showing your areas that are not fully optimised for your chosen term such as the page URL and image alt tags.

However, in the free version you are only able to have one focus keyword, which may be problematic if you are targeting more than one keyword to a page.