The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is hands down the best SEO plugin available. In this article, I focus on one very useful feature of the plugin: how to use it to optimize WordPress blog posts. It’s fairly simple and becomes quick and easy with practice. That being said, the plugin does not optimize the blog posts for you. You have to do it manually, following the tips the plugin gives you. Watch the video below in which I give you step by step instructions on how to optimize WordPress blog posts using the Yoast SEO plugin.
The Yoast SEO plugin does need some configuration
A common mistake people make with the Yoast SEO plugin is thinking it does everything automatically. Lots of people seem to think they simply have to install the plugin to make their website SEO friendly. Actually, Yoast SEO is not that type of plugin. It does take some configuration. The initial configuration is not too involved and the plugin guides you through it. It only takes a few minutes to complete. But, even after that initial configuration is done, your site is far from being SEO friendly.
Human input still matters
As I said above, Yoast SEO is the best search engine optimization plugin you can get. Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that most SEO requires human input. Nowadays, on page optimization is mostly a matter of quality content. The search engines bots have developed to the point where they understand English and other human languages. Keyword stuffing will no longer get your site to the top of the search results. What you need is a lot of well written, relevant content on each page of your website.
SEO friendly blog posts can get your site to the top of the SERPs
Partly as a result of the sophistication of modern search engine bots, blog posts have become a big factor in SEO. One of the best ways to get your site to the top of the search engine results is to regularly publish relevant, SEO-friendly blog posts. As I demonstrate in the tutorial above, the plugin makes it easy to optimize your blog posts for both SEO and readability. You can use the Yoast SEO plugin to make all of the blog posts on your website—whether they be old or new posts–SEO friendly. Once you’ve learned how to do that, you can also optimize every page on your site. Optimizing pages with Yoast SEO is exactly like optimizing blog posts. Once you can use the plugin to optimize blog posts, you can apply that to optimizing pages.