Yoast SEO tool in WordPress

Yoast SEO is definitely one of the best WordPress SEO plugins available today – proven by the fact that it has been downloaded over 4.5 million times! The fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt either.

Apart from improving your website’s SEO in all aspects.

This plugin goes that extra mile to take care of every technical optimization.

Moreover, it offers a wide variety of features that makes it an all-in-one SEO plugin.

Key plugin features:

• Snippet preview allows you to see how your page or post will look like in search results.
• Page Analysis: This feature checks minute things such as length of the posts, a presence of a meta description and whether it contains the focused keyword, etc.
• Meta and link elements: With this plugin, you’d have the power to determine the pages. It’s won’t be shown by Google in its search results. While WordPress only exhibits canonical link elements on a page, Yoast SEO makes it available everywhere.
• XML sitemaps: With its most advanced XML sitemaps feature, this plugin creates XML sitemaps automatically and informs Google and Bing of its existence.
• Social integration: Yoast SEO comes equipped with Facebook OpenGraph implementation to link SEO and social media.
• Multi-site compatibility: Unlike some other plugins, Yoast SEO is multisite compatible.
• Breadcrumbs: This unique feature empowers you to develop easy navigation for both search engines and users.

Pros and cons:

Yoast SEO is as popular as it is because it offers a lot of flexibility with your website’s content, setting up titles, meta-descriptions. As well as Social Media sharing information for each post. Moreover, you can set up a sitemap, add basic schema – and it’s all pretty beginner-friendly.

However, in their quest to facilitate newcomers in using Yoast, the creators have basically hidden all the advanced options – making you manually turn custom fields on.

Also, Yoast SEO and readability recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt seeing as they often encourage keyword stuffing or disregard the importance of LSI, etc.

If you use Yoast SEO, especially as a WP beginner, you should take these suggestions as exactly that – only suggestions. Otherwise, either replace the SEO plugin you’re using or change the way you do things on your website.