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August 8, 2017

Master SEO With a Single WordPress Plugin

Master SEO With a Single Plugin

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process where grow your site’s visibility organically in search engine results.  I first learned about SEO when I attended the Creative at Heart Conference a little over two years ago. Like many young business owners, I had no idea what it was and how important it is to your business. Even though I was able to walk away from the conference with an understanding of its importance, I still had no idea how to apply it to my site. For two years, I convinced myself that it didn’t matter too much. I felt like my entire business was already a juggling act, and I didn’t need to worry about all of little details for every single blog post I wrote. Boy was I wrong…

My new website has been up and running for 8 months now, and only recently did I start seeing traffic on my site continuously grow. Back in June, I was trying to figure out why I wasn’t able to get more people to visit my blog, until I realized it was because I wasn’t showing up in search results. Why? You guessed it: my SEO was non-existent. Begrudgingly, I decided to do more research on Search Engine Optimization to try to figure out how to make my posts show up more in search results. It wasn’t long before I discovered a single plugin that makes SEO a breeze, and today, I’m sharing it with you!

Introducing the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress!

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

Yoast has been a complete game-changer for my business, and the best part: you can get it for free! They do have a premium version that you can pay for, but the free version produces some really amazing results. This little plugin increased traffic to my website within a week after installing it! It makes it SO easy to write posts with intention, and now my site is showing up more in searches. Showing up in more searches has not only resulted in more traffic to my site, but has also led to more inquiries! Let me tell you how easy it is to use this plugin:

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

Yoast is perfect for someone like me who has no idea what to include in their blog posts to optimize it for search engines. Once you install it onto your WordPress site, you can see the plugin underneath each blog post and page of your website. You have the ability to choose a keyword, edit the description, and edit the title. With the premium version, you are able to pick multiple keywords.

The “Snippet” preview shows you how it will look when it pops up in a search engine. It tells you if your title or description is too long, and it tells you if you’ve used the focus keyword before on another post. In the example below, everything is just the right length because it is green, but if the title or the meta description becomes too long, they will turn red.

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

If you scroll down past the Snippet preview, you’ll find an analysis for the keyword you chose. You must choose this keyword wisely because you need to include it a certain amount of times in your post, in headings, and in your title. You also have to be careful when choosing the keyword because you don’t want it to sound unnatural. I’ve seen tons of blog posts where it was obvious what the keyword was because it was just shoved into every sentence, and it did not sound right at all. Frequently what I’ll do is write my post and choose a keyword based on that, but there are many other tricks to picking the perfect keyword that I won’t get into today.

You also need to make sure you’re including both outbound and internal links in your post. Including internal links to other pages on your website drives your audience to content they might be interested in. Using external links in order to drive traffic to other websites is not only helpful for your audience, but helps boost your rankings in search engines. If you can’t remember all of this — don’t worry! The analysis gives you an easy checklist to complete right below each post!

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

Yoast also tells you how your post ranks on readability, which is another factor that affects your SEO. You can see from the image below some of the things it looks for in your post. You don’t want your paragraphs to be too long, or have too many words in each sentence. If you don’t pass on all of these things, it’s not the end of the world, but you want to get as close as you can to these recommendations!

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

If you can’t figure out what the analysis is talking about when it’s giving you suggestions, you can select the little eyeball next to each one and it will go through and highlight what it wants you to change in your post in bright purple.

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

Once you’ve made adjustments and all of those bullets turn green, then your post is good to go! After you publish it, you can go back out to the main page to see an overview of your posts. The right column shows you your post’s readability score, and the left shows you it’s SEO score. If any of the bullets are orange or red, then you may want to go back and address some of the issues affecting the scores.

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

If you have WordPress, then you definitely need to download Yoast and install it on your site! In this post, I gave the basic rundown of how it works with each individual blog post and page, but you can do so much more with this plugin! Next week, I’ll talk about how you can use this plugin to get more traffic from Pinterest, so check back next Tuesday because you don’t want to miss that post!

 

If You like This post, then you may also be interested in:

Activating Rich Pins on Pinterest
5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being a Small Business Owner
The Importance of Having a Workspace

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Filed Under: Business, Editing, Education, Marketing, Photography

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Comments

  1. Taylor Fisher says

    August 14, 2017 at 9:44 am

    This is an incredibly helpful and awesome post! It’s amazing how little I feel I know about SEO, even when I’m researching it. Thank you so much for the information!

    Reply
  2. Kim McIntire says

    August 14, 2017 at 10:25 am

    This is amazing and so helpful! I have yoast installed, but I haven’t done most of those things you’ve described. I’m excited to try them out! And I’m excited about your next blog about it too!

    Reply
  3. Lisa Kingsbury says

    August 14, 2017 at 11:47 am

    This looks like such an amazing SEO plugin! It makes me wish my website was on WordPress!

    Reply
  4. Ashley Durham says

    August 14, 2017 at 1:11 pm

    Yoast is the best SEO plug in!!! We use it, it makes SEO a snap!

    Reply
  5. Sarah says

    August 14, 2017 at 1:22 pm

    This is such a great post, with so many helpful tips. I use the yoast plug in and is has helped alot. Totally user friendly as well!

    Reply
  6. E. says

    August 14, 2017 at 2:17 pm

    I’ve heard only amazing things about this product. I need to work on my SEO game, and this will definitely get back to the top. Thank you for all of this helpful info! *bookmarked*

    Reply
  7. Kelly says

    August 14, 2017 at 2:35 pm

    Yoast is a gamechanger. SEO is so complicated and it makes blogging so much easier

    Reply
  8. Nicole says

    August 14, 2017 at 3:04 pm

    Thanks so much for the tips!

    Reply
  9. Hannah says

    August 14, 2017 at 4:25 pm

    I have this plugin and you’re right! It’s so easy and a great way to help boost SEO! Thanks for the tip!

    Reply
  10. Whitney Milton says

    August 14, 2017 at 4:48 pm

    Well this is amazing. I do not have WordPress. Can this be used in other websites like Squarespace?

    Reply
  11. Larissa says

    August 14, 2017 at 11:06 pm

    There is so much great seo information here! I am saving this to come back and read again later!!

    Reply
  12. Aida says

    August 15, 2017 at 7:54 am

    SEO is so important to understand and implement! Thank you so much for this helpful post!

    Reply
  13. Ashleigh says

    August 15, 2017 at 10:15 am

    OK you convinced me! I’ve been avoiding Yost for a while now… I got to get it! Thanks for all the great information!

    Reply
  14. Toya says

    August 15, 2017 at 11:50 am

    Thankful for this post especially since I’ve decided to start a new blog after blogging many years without truly learning about SEO. Very helpful! Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  15. Valerie says

    August 15, 2017 at 1:14 pm

    This is so helpful! Thank you for sharing this tip!

    Reply
  16. Jenny says

    August 15, 2017 at 1:19 pm

    This is a freaking awesome post! I learned so much, thank you!

    Reply
  17. Christie says

    August 15, 2017 at 1:30 pm

    Man this makes me really wish I had a WordPress site! How helpful is this plugin! Thanks for all the info Emily.

    Reply
  18. April says

    August 15, 2017 at 2:26 pm

    This is a very enlightening post! I wish I used WordPress for my blog but I use Zenfolio.

    Reply
  19. Kerlyn Van Gelder says

    August 15, 2017 at 11:46 pm

    Wow this is such an amazing plugin to have! I use it when I post for Clickin Moms. I wish there was something like this for Squarespace!

    Reply
  20. Lauren Laveria says

    August 16, 2017 at 1:29 pm

    Totally saving this in my favorites page and looking back at it multiple times. This is a godsend! Thank you so much for this, I’ve never truly understand SEO and this is so easy to understand and beautifully put together!

    Reply

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