What is YOAST SEO plugin?
YOAST SEO is a popular WordPress plugin designed to help webmasters optimize their WordPress sites for search engines .
Main features
Article and page optimization
This is the basis of the YOAST plugin.
It makes it easy to write title and description tags in WordPress pages and articles :
yoast plugin to write title and description
You can also see a preview of your page in Google search results:
Google search results preview
To be fair: more and more WordPress themes allow you to write titles and meta descriptions in your post and page editors.
But the great thing about Yoast is that it keeps all of your page's meta information intact...even if you decide to change the theme.
question prompt
YOAST can show you SEO issues found in the WordPress control panel:
yoast shows SEO issues in wordress sites
As shown in the above image, it can be seen that there are two problems that need to be improved.
You can click to improve the article according to the prompts, which is very convenient.
social card
Each social network (eg facebook, Linkedin, Twitter) has its own rules and restrictions regarding character limits and image size. So setting up social cards is a difficult problem.
And in the social properties of yoast.
Allows you to easily create social cards in the WordPress editor.
yoast plugin social card settings
These are the social cards we set up for this article. We want people to look great when they share articles:
twitter social share card
If you upgrade to the premium version of yoast, you can also see a preview view of people before sharing.
Content optimization
This function is divided into several different parts:
Readability : Gives you an idea of the readability level of your content. And provide suggestions on how to improve readability.
Keyword Focus : Helps you optimize your content around keywords.
I don't really like this feature though.
Because it focuses on outdated SEO factors that no longer matter (like keyword density)
Many SEO novices do not hesitate to pile up keywords in order to make yoast show the green light, which actually does more harm than good. There may also be penalties from Google.
Of course, this feature also has some useful suggestions, such as Yoast can let you know if a page or article has a seo friendly URL.
yoast-seo-friendly URL
So if they take out the keyword density telemarketing list and keyword length stuff, it's still very useful.
Cornerstone Content : This is a new feature in Yoast that lets you tell Yoast: "This is one of the best content we've ever published". Then, when you publish new articles, Yoast makes sure those new articles link back to your cornerstone content.
Network Administrator Tools
You can use this feature to confirm your Google Search Console account.
advanced
Here, you can add "noindex" tags to pages and posts, create canonical tags, and even adjust robots.txt settings.
Internal link
This is an advanced feature of Yoast designed to make internal linking a little easier.
Here's how it works:
First, you write a blog post as you normally would.