Yoast SEO Tips and Tricks To Improve Your Site's Ranking

Intro

Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be one of the most dominant models in digital marketing today. If you want to create an authoritative online presence, you have to improve your SEO rankings. However, doing so requires various factors first, including keyword optimization, readability, quality sitemaps, and more.

You need more helpful tools in your arsenal to enhance your WordPress site's performance in search engines. Fortunately, the Yoast SEO plugin is equipped with various features to help you efficiently optimize your site.

Keep reading below to learn more about Yoast SEO and some tricks to maximize its features.

Understanding the Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that offers many features to help improve a web page and its contents for free. Generally, these tools aim for sites to rank well on the search engine results page (SERP).

The best thing about this plugin is that it offers some of the most user-friendly features in web optimization. Installing this plugin on your WordPress site will integrate various toolbars into your page's backend. They will analyze and provide suggestions on how to improve your content.

For instance, there's a focus keyphrase input field for every page of your site. You can use this feature to choose the right keywords or keyphrases that you can use to improve your rankings. There's also a tool that rates your readability and allows you to edit your SERP title tags and meta descriptions.

Moreover, the Yoast SEO plugin offers a paid version with more features. However, regardless if you're going for the free or paid version, you can get the essential functions to help you.

Maximizing Yoast SEO for Your Website

Using Yoast SEO will enable you to boost your SEO strategies better. To help get you started, here are some tips you can try with this helpful platform.

(Image source: Pexels)

Utilize the readability tool

Poorly-written content is a major turn-off for your visitors. Prioritizing keyphrases will make your content awkward and sound unnatural. You should maintain readability to prevent your readers from looking at other sites.

Fortunately, once you install the Yoast SEO plugin, you automatically get a readability tool. Generally, this feature helps identify all the readability issues in your content. With this tool, you can write in an active voice, shorten sentences and paragraphs, and add more transition words. It also helps you improve and organize subheadings. All of these are vital factors in making an article more conversational and professional.

The readability tool is a straightforward feature that provides a color-coded scoring mechanic that's easy to understand. It lists down sentences that are hard to read and gives them a red score. All you have to do is revise until the color red turns green. That means you've improved readability.

Improve your existing content

Before you write new content, ensure that you haven't done the topic already. Check your library for anything similar. You may have written one a few years ago. If so, it's best to improve those existing articles instead of writing a new one identical to it.

You should add new relevant information and up-to-date external links. Furthermore, you must optimize them for today's content standard, especially if you wrote them years ago. That means ensuring that it follows the latest practices in content writing.

Additionally, looking for identical content in your library will help prevent keyword cannibalization. It occurs when blogs repeat the same information multiple times on different pages. Unfortunately, Google filters out any identical content, which could cause your rankings to deteriorate. That's why reviewing old content is vital.

(Image source: Pexels)

Yoast SEO helps save time in this process by ironically enabling you to duplicate content. The plugin's Duplicate Post function lets you duplicate existing content and rewrite it as a draft. Once you've finished writing, you can hit republish. This tool will prevent you from wasting time working back and forth in various document files. Plus, it allows you to work without messing up your web pages.

You can also get professional help to improve the ranking of your existing content. Today, there are several SEO agencies that can identify areas that need improvement in your site.

For example, Traffv is an SEO agency that aims to bring traffic to online brands. The company works to help its clients understand their target audience. They help develop SEO strategies that give brands the exposure they need.

Use a tool for internal linking

Internal links are vital for websites in many ways. Generally, they help search engines understand and rank your website better. Plus, it helps prolong your visitors' engagement by directing them where to go next.

Unfortunately, adding links takes time, often with the help of professionals. The good news is that the Yoast SEO premium plugin offers internal linking suggestions. This feature saves time from scouring your site while looking for the proper internal link.

Generally, this tool provides recommendations for related articles you can link to. These suggestions appear in the Yoast SEO sidebar. All there is to do is find the best links that fit your content from the selection given.

Enhance your site speed

Nothing drives visitors away more than a slow or unresponsive web page. Unfortunately, site speed is a ranking factor of search engines. That means Google prioritizes fast-loading sites more because it knows users appreciate them better.

Fortunately, various Yoast SEO tools are available to test or audit your site. For example, you can install a caching plugin to address your site speed issue. Generally, rendering a page in WordPress requires back-and-forth queries to the database. With a caching plugin, you create a static version of your page to show to your visitors. These versions use lighter HTML instead of processing scripts that take up too many resources. Because of that, the loading time will be faster.

Apart from plugins, you can also optimize your images to contribute to your site speed. Remember that large files on web pages tend to slow down loading time. Furthermore, you can also use Yoast SEO tools to optimize your images for the proper size.

Boost important web pages

Updating existing pages is vital for search engines to understand and index your website better. By knowing what your site is about, search engines can appropriately show it in SERPs.

Maximize Yoast SEO's content analysis tools to know if your web pages are of excellent quality. Ensure that they're readable and use the right keywords. Plus, constantly update them with the latest details for new visitors. Every change in your business has to reflect on your site. For instance, a change in phone number or address.

Identify related keyphrases and synonyms

Using one keyphrase will make your content feel awkward, significantly affecting readability and ranking. It also increases the risk of keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is an outdated SEO practice where sites use the exact keywords repeatedly to try and boost ranking. It used to be an effective strategy, but it's now considered harmful in modern SEO.

Finding synonyms or related phrases is helpful because search engines know how to look for them on websites. That means Google isn't looking for one focus keyword anymore. So if you include them in your content, you can further expand your presence and ranking.

Generally, Yoast SEO offers keyword optimizations that enable users to analyze if their focus keywords are effective. However, the premium version of the plugin can provide more.

It provides a feature that helps identify related keywords or keyphrases. Because of this tool, you can avoid keyword stuffing and optimize your content with synonyms or related terms.

Optimize other essential elements

Title tags, meta descriptions, and slugs are vital to allowing search engines to better understand and crawl your site. They may be short, but they significantly impact a site's SEO performance.

Unfortunately, manually adding and editing them can be challenging without a plugin. With Yoast SEO, you can create these elements with ease. The plugin's free version offers editors for these sections. Users can simply edit them with ease.

Use Every Tool Available for Better SEO

Yoast SEO is one of WordPress' most effective plugins that enables users to boost their site's SEO performance. The best thing about this platform and its features is that it offers the essential tools you need to optimize your content. That means you can benefit from this plugin today and decide later if you want more helpful features.