Best SEO plugin for WordPress 2017 – 2018 Yoast SEO step by step tutorial
Learn about Best SEO plugin for WordPress 2017 – 2018 Yoast SEO step by step tutorial
WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO. This was true when Joost wrote his original WordPress SEO article in 2008 (updated every few months) and it’s still true today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this Yoast SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. Yoast SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
Write better content with Yoast SEO
Using the snippet preview, you can see a rendering of what your post or page will look like in the search results, whether your title is too long or too short, and whether your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result. This way the plugin will help you not only increase rankings but also increase the click through rate for organic search results.
Page Analysis
The Yoast SEO plugins Page Analysis functionality checks simple things you’re bound to forget. It checks, for instance, if you have images in your post and whether they have an alt tag containing the focus keyword for that post. It also checks whether your posts are long enough, whether you’ve written a meta description and if that meta description contains your focus keyword, if you’ve used any subheadings within your post, etc. etc.
The plugin alsgruo allows you to write meta titles and descriptions for all your category, tag and custom taxonomy archives, giving you the option to further optimize those pages.
Combined, this plugin makes sure that your content is the type of content search engines will love!
Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization
While out of the box WordPress is pretty good for SEO, it needs some tweaks here and there. This Yoast SEO plugin guides you through some of the settings needed, for instance by reminding you to enable pretty permalinks. But it also goes beyond that, by automatically optimizing and inserting the meta tags and link elements that Google and other search engines like so much:
Meta & Link Elements
With the Yoast SEO plugin you can control which pages Google shows in its search results and which pages it doesn’t show. By default, it will tell search engines to index all of your pages, including category and tag archives, but to only show the first pages in the search results. It’s not very useful for a user to end up on the third page of your “personal” category, right?
WordPress itself only shows canonical link elements on single pages, but Yoast SEO makes it output canonical link elements everywhere. Google has recently announced they would also use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link elements in the head section of your paginated archives. This plugin adds those automatically. See this post for more info.
XML Sitemaps
The Yoast SEO plugin has the most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality in any WordPress plugin. Once you check the box, it automatically creates XML sitemaps and notifies Google & Bing of the sitemaps’ existence. These XML sitemaps include the images in your posts & pages too, so that your images may be found better in the search engines too.
These XML Sitemaps will even work on large sites, because of how they’re created, using one index sitemap that links to sub-sitemaps for each 1,000 posts. They will also work with custom post types and custom taxonomies automatically, while giving you the option to remove those from the XML sitemap should you wish to.
Because of using XSL stylesheets for these XML Sitemaps, the XML sitemaps are easily readable for the human eye too, so you can spot things that shouldn’t be in there.
RSS Optimization
Are you being outranked by scrapers? Instead of cursing at them, use them to your advantage! By automatically adding a link to your RSS feed pointing back to the original article, you’re telling the search engine where they should be looking for the original. This way, the Yoast SEO plugin increases your own chance of ranking for your chosen keywords and gets rid of scrapers in one go!
Breadcrumbs
If your theme is compatible, and themes based on for instance Genesis or by WooThemes often are, you can use the built-in Breadcrumbs functionality. This allows you to create an easy navigation that is great for both users and search engines, and will support the search engines in understanding the structure of your site.