How Yoast Helps with SEO

Yoast SEO is a highly recommended plugin when using a WordPress website. According to the Yoast website, “Yoast SEO makes sure your site meets the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to optimize your content for SEO and overall readability.”

Woman on laptop. We should you how to use your keywords in Yoast

How to Use Yoast SEO in WordPress

Once you have completed setting up your web page using your keywords and phrases, it’s time to use Yoast SEO to see if there are any errors with your page and finalize the setup.

Let’s use this example.

The main keywords are SEO Keywords.
The phrase is What are SEO Keywords.

From the backend of your website, click on the page to edit.

Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section. The goal is to turn these frowns upside down. Here are steps on how:

Step 1: We show you how to enter your focus keyword

Front the Focus Keyphrase field, enter your keywords (SEO Keywords).

Yoast text field. We should you how to enter your focus keyphrase

Step 2: We show you how to enter your SEO title

Enter your SEO title, which should reflect the focus keyphrase you used above. After that enter 1 space | YourDomainName. See my example below.

It’s important that your progress bar gets to green (starts off as red). This means your SEO title is great!

Once that is entered, a slug will be automatically created for you.

Yoast SEO title progress bar. We should how to set this up.

Step 3: We show how to enter a meta description

Enter a meta description. This should explain what the article is about. See my example below.

It’s important that your progress bar gets to green (starts off as red). This means your SEO title is great!

Yoast meta description progress bar. We show you how to set up your meta description.

Yoast Google preview. We should you how your Yoast set up will appear

When you have completed those 3 steps you will be shown how this will look in search engines. Look familiar?

Now you can understand where this information comes from next time you’re doing a search online.

Step 4: We show you how to check for errors

The final step is to drop down the category called SEO analysis. You want every dot to be green. This means you have no errors. YAY!!!!

If you do get errors and want to know how to fix them, refer to the below section.

Yoast error check. We shoulw you how to check for errors

Common Errors

After doing my first few blogs, I found these were the most common errors I would get:

Error #1: Keyphrase in introduction: Your keyphrase or its synonyms do not appear in the first paragraph. Make sure the topic is clear immediately.

Solution: Make sure your focus keyphrase is used in the first paragraph of your post. Note, this is the first text widget you use on your page (not heading). Once you have that updated, Update your post and see if that corrects the error.

Error #2: Keyphrase in title: The exact match of the focus keyphrase appears in the SEO title, but not at the beginning. Move it to the beginning for the best results.

Solution: Review your SEO title again and make sure you are using your focus keyword at the beginning. Once you have that updated, Update your post and see if that corrects the error.

You may stumble across other errors but WordPress does help by providing links with more detail.

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