SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It’s the practice of optimizing your web pages to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google or other search engines. SEO focuses on improving the rankings in the organic – aka non-paid – search results. If you have a website and you want to get more traffic, it should be part of your marketing efforts.

Yoast SEO gives you an overall score for Readability and SEO. Green dots mean “good”, orange dots mean “OK”, red dots mean “needs improvement”.

The focus keyphrase is the search term that you most want your page to rank for, so when people search for that keyword or phrase, they should find you.

When you optimize your blog post for a specific keyphrase, it’s important that people actually search for that keyphrase. If they’re not, you will be doing a lot of hard work for nothing. But how do you choose the right focus keyphrase?

There are two things to consider when choosing your focus keyphrase:

1.Your audience: what are they searching for and which words are they using? You should get inside the heads of your audience and try to figure this out. You can use tools like Google Trends to help you with this.

2.Your competition: you have to focus on keyphrases that are not too competitive, otherwise you’ll have a hard time ranking. To check this, you can search for your proposed focus keyphrase in Google and see whether or not the post you want to write would stand out from the other results. Does your site have enough authority?

The Yoast SEO plugin comes with a handy Google preview, which will show you what your page will look like in the Google search results. It shows you a preview of the page title and meta description and allows you to optimize them per individual page or post.

Editing the SEO title

The title is the first thing people see in the search results for your posts and pages and in many, many cases the only thing. So it’d better be good.

Slug

A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a particular page on a website in an easy to read form. In other words, it’s the part of the URL that explains the page’s content.

Editing the Meta Description

The meta description is a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the phrase that is searched for is contained in the description. Because of that, optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO.

Characteristics of a good meta description
There are a couple of characteristics that a good meta description should have. We’ll sum up the most important ones.

• It can be up to 155 characters.
  Every now and then, Google changes the length. Nowadays, you’ll mostly see meta descriptions of up to 155 characters, with some outliers of 300 characters. We would advise you to get crucial information in the first 155 characters of your meta description.
• It should match the content
  This is important. Google will expose the meta descriptions that trick the visitor into clicking. It might even penalize the site that created the meta description. In addition, it will probably increase bounce rates and is a bad idea for that reason alone. You want the meta description to match the content on the page.
• It should contain the focus keyphrase.
  If the search keyphrase matches text in the meta description, Google will be more inclined to use that meta description and highlight it in the search results. This will instantly show the relation between your link and the search query.
• The meta description should be unique.
  Every page should be unique, so the same should be true for every meta description. If a user reads your meta description, he or she should have a clear view of what is to be found on that page. If both descriptions are the same, there is no way to determine which result fits better, for the user or for Google.

The content analysis in Yoast SEO assesses crucial aspects of the posts and pages you create. In particular, it checks how SEO friendly and easy to read your content is.

Make those synonyms work for you.

Google has come a long way since the early days of SEO. It’s now able to understand texts and take related concepts and synonyms into account. It can recognize related entities. All this to be able to serve its users the best result. And part of being the best result, is making sure your texts are easy to read. Google wants to serve readable texts. So make sure you deliver! Think of synonyms for your keyword or keyphrase and use them to your advantage. Take a moment to come up with a few alternatives for your keyword. But also think of topics that are strongly related to your keyword. And the use of synonyms and related keyphrases helps Google understand the context of your text which increases your chances to rank!

In Yoast SEO there is also a feature that helps you find related keyphrases. You can add those related keyphrases to the SEO analysis.

Social previews in Yoast SEO visualize what your post will look like when shared on Facebook or Twitter. You can see right away if your image fits and whether your title and description will display well.

Facebook preview in Yoast SEO
This preview tab also allows you to edit the way your Facebook post is shown when shared. Our plugin makes it possible to change your social image, title and description right there in your preview. This makes your social media optimization a lot quicker and easier, as you won’t have to leave your post to make these changes.

Twitter preview in Yoast SEO
For Twitter, the functionality is quite similar to Facebook. Simply click that tab to preview how your page is shown when it gets shared to Twitter. By default, the plugin uses the title, description and image right there in your preview.