- Hey y'all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday.
We're looking at Yoast, the WordPress SEO plugin
with over 5 million active installs as of today.
If you are one of those amazing 5 million
using this free plugin inside your WordPress website
to boost your SEO,
I'm going to explain a little bit further about the plugin
and I'm gonna highlight four major must-use features.
Let's get to it.
(cheerful electronic music)
Hey y'all, my name is Kori Ashton
and you have found a YouTube channel dedicated
to all things WordPress.
I wanna walk us through the power of Yoast,
which is a free SEO plugin inside of WordPress.
Now, let's all level-set expectation here.
Adding this free tool to your website
is not the instant magic sauce for boosting your rank.
What Yoast really does is it allows us
to kind of look at our pages and our posts
and all of our content with a measuring stick,
basically a light system of green light, good,
orange light, needs some work, red light, not so great.
And having those different options there
lets us visibly see potentially
the way search engines might approach our pages
and our content.
So thinking about it in that sense,
let's think about four things that we should be using
inside of this plugin to boost our SEO.
Okay, I'm assuming that you've already got it
plugged into your website,
you've you've already activated Yoast,
and when you've done that, now you've got this,
living over here on the left side of your dashboard,
you've got your SEO tab sitting there.
Clicking on general takes you to the first must-use feature
that I believe is really important when you come in here,
and this really is one of those things that allows you
to kind of do some quick housekeeping in this tab.
So inside of the general tab,
there are two areas I want you to look at.
I want you to be sure
that all of these are toggled on or off
to what you would allow or want
to have happening on your website.
You can see that some of these are premium,
so if you upgrade to the pro version,
you can toggle those on or off.
But the most important one that I see on here
really is this XML site map.
That allows your website to instantly have a site map
for search engines
and it's a really, really great thing,
so please be certain that that is toggled on by default
whenever you launch Yoast.
That should be on.
But just general housekeeping, run over there,
be sure that's toggled on so that you'll have that site map.
The thing to note is this.
When you click on this little tiny question mark here,
check this out.
It'll tell you that it's actually enabling the XML site map
and it will give you the link to it.
You can click on that.
It'll open up and show you your site map
and you can then take that URL.
I'm gonna lower this down just a bit here.
Let's see if I can lower this down for you.
Hang on, I want you to be able to see the of top that.
There you go.
And check out that very, very top up there.
Do you see this?
You can take that link right there, put it in your footer,
link to it as your site map, totally for free.
You don't need another plugin to make that happen.
The other area inside the general tab
that I want you to look at is webmaster tools.
Again, this is just general housekeeping
that you need to do when you first set this thing up.
And if you've been running this for a while,
you can still come in here and make some of these changes.
The one I'm interested in most, of course, is Google here.
You wanna be certain that you have verified your website
inside of the search console.
You can click on this little link, jump over here,
and be certain that you have in fact verified
and you're good to go.
Why is that important?
Because Google will actually show you reports
if your website is functioning properly or not,
if there are any issues, any errors, any security risks.
Anything like that,
Google will send you a report totally for free.
The second thing I wanna show you
is over here on the left side, again,
go into the search appearance section.
Let's go in there and I wanna show you
two quick, again, kind of housekeeping things
that you can do.
Right here, this knowledge graph and schema.org block,
just go ahead and fill that out if you can.
Add in a name
and, if you are an organization or a person,
add in your logo right here and get all that set up
and that will really help inside of the knowledge graph.
It's just another little boost on your SEO.
Awesome, all right, number three must-use feature
inside of Yoast.
I'm gonna take you now into an actual post or a page.
This is applicable, either spot.
I want you to see right away
on this far right side over here underneath my picture.
Can you see this line of red lights?
Okay, that's the red light/green light type of visual aid
that helps you understand
how well a search engine might be able to read your content.
Red, obviously, not that great.
So we really wanna work on getting these to a green status.
So how do I do that?
Well, it's certainly not magic like that,
but let me show you what this looks like
and how you might be able to move
from red lights to green lights
inside of your WordPress website.
Let's go in and edit a post
and what I'd like you to do is go down to the Yoast section
on that page or post.
Again, this works either way.
This is where you're gonna activate all this goodness
to get those lights moving to green.
Now, I'm not gonna walk you through a full tutorial
on how to use Yoast right here.
I'm talking to those who are already using it.
If you're interested in learning how to set this up,
again, I have a different video.
This video is gonna keep us on track
thinking about what are some things that might be newer
that you didn't know lived here.
This is number three.
Go into this social section right here,
this little tab right here, fill this out.
Have you ever shared a post or a page
on Facebook or on Twitter
and it gives you this wonky image
or it gives you this really weird description?
Well, you can by default set right here
unique conversations, unique images,
unique call else to action,
all regarding this page, this post, this link,
this one bit of content on your website.
So super cool to do.
You can select the image,
add in the title, add in the description,
and when anyone shares this content out there,
it'll have this uniform conversation.
So this is a really cool tab.
Again, this is something that you do for every page,
every post as a part of your publishing process.
And I've saved number four for the readability tab.
Now, many of you have commented to me
that this is the most frustrating thing
because you try to get green on both.
You try to go for green on the SEO side
and you try to go for green on the readability side.
I really hope that y'all will take time to learn
why the Yoast plugin tells you that this page might be red.
Sometimes it's simply because you have
a lot of jargon on there and it's fearful
that your audience won't understand the language
that you have there.
Potentially you have elongated sentences
and maybe your structure isn't really friendly
for those who might wanna just skim down your page.
So I want you to look at this readability tab
and go through these clicks here and understand
why it's giving you the rating it's giving you
and see if that feels right.
You might be able to learn here
and understand your writing style.
You might be able to get some aha moments
as to oh, my goodness,
I didn't even realize I was presenting my content
in a way that my audience might not understand.
But then you have to measure that
up against the true state of awareness of your audience.
If they're coming into your blog
because they completely understand what you're offering them
for information or education,
then they're going to be looking
for that more advanced conversation
that might have a lot of jargon.
But if their state of awareness is total beginner level,
then you are going to need to try to reach
for a green light here
and just follow through these steps
that explain to you what the problems are
and see if you can start to tweak and adjust your content
so that you can move the needle a little bit
and help Google, and any search engine for that matter,
better understand your content.
Y'all, be sure to like and subscribe
because every week I'm right here,
helping you improve your online marketing.
And if you loved this video on Yoast,
I have an entire playlist dedicated
to this incredible plugin.
I will walk you through the installation,
all the way through setting it up.
So please take a look at that playlist.
I'll put the link above up here
and in the description box below.
I hope to see you next week.
Please stay safe. Bye, y'all.
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