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How to use the Yoast SEO plugin and add SEO title, description and keywords

We used the Yoast SEO plugin, that helps you to optimize your website for search

engines. And it does that well, but it needs your input

SEO analysis

When you start writing a post or page, you will find the analyses. In WordPress, the so-called meta box is right below the larger text area where you write your content:

For you, as a user, this Yoast SEO box will prove very valuable. As you can see, there are a couple of tabs here.

One tab where you can insert the keyword you want to optimize the page for (focus keyword), in this case: “Big Bandstand Cassiobury Park”

One tab that says Readability.

What this plugin can analyze in SEO analysis

At present, the plugin perform these checks in the SEO analysis:

To open the full performance for the SEO, click on the “Edit snippet”

And you can see the “SEO title”, where you can put the title of the post – news

The “Meta description” – the description can be seen in Google, that you are targeting,

And you can see and fill in the “Focus keywords”. You can separate different keywords with “,”

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In the image above you can see the different characteristics of your text:

If you want your page to rank for a specific keyword, you should write at least 300 words about it. Otherwise, it may be considered a ‘thin content‘ page by Google, and you want to avoid that.

Add a meta description; it will invite visitors in Google to your website. Use the focus keyword and make it enticing to click.

You want to make clear right from the start what the page is about, so start adding the focus keyword from the beginning.

Add images to create a vivid experience for your users. Use the focus keyword in the ALT text so that Google can relate that image to the keyword.

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To set up a proper site structure, best is link to at least one other related page on your site. It keeps visitors on your site and shows them more (background) information.

You can also make sites to link to other websites as well, as this opens up the web. Point people to the websites where you get your information. It’ll tell Google what websites relate to each other on what subjects.

A short page title allows you to add a trigger for a visitor in Google to click to your website.

If you add that focus keyword at the beginning of your title, it will have the most value. Also, it will immediately stand out when your post is shared

Repeat your focus keyword in your URL. As a result, even without context, it will be clear what clicking that link will bring you. Furthermore, Google also likes having it in there.

You optimize a page for a certain keyword – not a website. Prevent competing pages! Yoast SEO will warn you if you write more than one post about the same keyword. When this happens, use a variation, or a long tail keyword.

What’s more: Cornerstone content and snippet preview

An editable snippet preview, which tells you how the plugin displays your website to Google and other search engines.

What determines the look of a snippet in the search results?

If you search for a specific word, Google will bold that keyword in the text and URL of the snippets it shows. But it actually goes one step further. Once it has determined which pages will rank for your search, it tries to find a bit of the page that has that word in it. If your meta description (if you have one) doesn’t contain the keyword that was searched for, it’ll grab a “random” snippet of the page that contains that keyword.

This is one of the reasons why it helps tremendously if you know what the most searched for keyword for a page is going to be, so you can optimize the snippet for it. Let’s slightly change the look of the above snippet preview: if you set the focus keyword of your post, that word will be automatically bolded:

The 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. Funnily enough, Google actually changes your title for you, if it thinks you’re not doing a good enough job.

The title in the snippet preview is determined based on the title template you’ve set in your SEO → Titles & Metas settings, using variables from your current post. In our case, that template is simply the default:

%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

As you can see the plugin takes the post title, and appends the separator (in our case’s that a middle dot) plus the site’s name. The %%page%% parameter is only used when

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you have a paginated post. You could have the category in there if you want, but that usually gives you less space to properly play with the title. Removing the site’s name is nota good idea. Google will usually rewrite your titles if they don’t contain branding, see the above post for details.

Yoast SEO allows you to have a title that’s different from your article’s main heading and in some cases, that’s a good idea. If you’ve done a bit of keyword research to determine the focus keyword for your page, you might have seen there are several variations of that keyword. Nicely optimized titles that’ll match the keywords were looking for.

The meta description

Now that our title is up to snuff, let’s work on the second biggest “item” in the snippet: the meta description. Often referred to as the “snippet” too, though that might be slightly confusing in this context.

The URL or “slug”

The slug is the part of the URL that identifies your article. So in our example above it was “the-snippet-preview-means” etc. Slugs in WordPress are normally the article title, lowercased, with spaces replaced by hyphens. Yoast SEO has an option to remove stop words from your slug, which has cleaned up our slug considerably already. Since we’ve opted to change the title of our post, we’ve edited the slug as well, simply to “snippet-preview”.

Readability analysis

Since SEO is one of those areas where content is indeed king, the plugin also provide a convenient readability analysis for you. The thing is: not all people have the same skills to process certain texts.