What does Yoast SEO do? • Yeast

SEO for your posts and pages

If you want your posts and pages to appear in search results, you need to optimize them! So if you use WordPress to create/edit posts, you have plenty of Yoast SEO tools available to help you create and optimize great content. And if you think SEO optimization is all about keywords, think again. The tools and tips in our Yoast SEO plugins also focus on high-quality content and user experience. Trust us because all of this will benefit your ranking directly or indirectly.

This is how the plugins help you optimize your posts and pages:

Make sure you optimize correctly (if not, we’ll let you know).

After you’ve done your keyword research, you’ll need to start optimizing the pages and posts on your sites for the keywords and key phrases you want to rank for. To do this, you can set a focus keyphrase for an article in Yoast SEO. The plugin then uses our content SEO analytics to determine how your content performs on various factors. It checks how often you use your key phrase, how long your text is and whether you have used internal links.

The results of these analyzes will help you optimize your post or page to rank for your chosen key phrase. You’ll see red, orange, and green lights to show how each factor is rated. This will give you an overview of the overall score and what else you can do to improve your ranking!

We also provide you with tools to help you figure out which keywords you can successfully target and to track how successful your content actually is. For the keyword research part, we integrate the leading online marketing platform SEMrush. To track the performance of your content in search, we integrate the rank tracking platform Wincher.

Guide to writing high-quality content – ​​in many languages!

It’s important to optimize your content to rank for the right key phrase, but don’t forget about your reader! Even if you write great content for search engines, your audience won’t get any value from it if they don’t understand it. If a person doesn’t understand your content, the chances of them purchasing something from you are almost zero. The same goes for the likelihood that they will share one of your articles with their friends. Therefore, you need to make sure that your content is also easy to understand. And this is where readability features come into play.

With our readability checks, you can take feedback in a way that suits you without losing your personal touch. If you are interested in all the factors that improve readability, you can read more about Yoast SEO’s readability features. In addition to readability and SEO checks, you can also optionally activate inclusive language analysis

All or most features are available in the following languages: English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Norwegian, Japanese, Slovak, And Greek.* We support more languages ​​at different levels. You can find other languages ​​in the overview.

* Unfortunately, it is not possible to calculate the Flesch Reading Ease Score for some of these languages. Check out the overview below to see which languages ​​are available.

Based on years of research

Yoast SEO’s readability features are well-researched analytics that give you feedback to optimize your writing. This may sound strange because the way you write can be very personal. Let’s explain how it works.

The plugin uses an algorithm to check your content for factors proven to improve readability. We look at transition word usage, passive voice usage, sentence and paragraph lengths, word complexity, and more. However, we have carefully crafted this algorithm to be as accurate as possible without being too strict.

Influence what Google shows in search results

Of course, you don’t just want your pages to appear in Google search results. You also want your search results to look great! That’s why Yoast SEO has tools to help you plan and preview what each page will (likely) look like when it appears on Google. We probably can’t avoid this here, as Google occasionally decides it knows better and shows something else instead. However, by optimizing specific output on your page, you can specify how you want Google to present your content to users. And it’s still worth it.

Titles and meta descriptions

Our plugin allows you to provide an SEO title (the “heading” of your search result) and a meta description (a short piece of text under your search heading that describes what users can find on your page) for each new page you publish. We will let you know if they are too long or your keyword is missing. If you want, you can also set default settings for all your pages.

You may have seen search results that contained additional parts beyond the usual heading and description format. The following example contains recipes with additional information such as reviews, cooking time, ingredients and images. And that’s just one example. Additional information can be added for all types of results, including products!

The way to achieve such results is to use schema-structured data. We’re not going to lie: it’s a complex, technical matter. Luckily, you don’t need to know any of the technical wizardry behind it. If you have Yoast SEO installed, you will automatically receive structured data output for your pages. All you need to do is choose a few options to make sure it meets your needs.

Manage social outcomes

Now, social media isn’t necessarily a part of SEO. But when you create great content, you often want to share that content on your social feeds too. That’s why Yoast SEO also has Facebook and X previews that you can customize to ensure your content always looks great no matter who shares it. You can set a specific title, description, and OpenGraph image for each post. Again, if you would prefer to set a standard structure for all posts, there is an option to do so.

Technical SEO for your website

We took a look at what Yoast SEO can do for your posts and pages. But overall, what can it do for your website? If technical SEO is not your strength, many of the following may not make sense to you. But don’t worry! Yoast SEO exists to make sure you don’t need to know all of these things.

Set up your website for SEO

The plugin settings make a lot of sense by default and our initial configuration also walks you through the steps to get your technical SEO settings right. Behind the scenes, our hidden features also prepare you with an XML sitemap, robots.txt file, site-level structured schema data, and more.

The free version of Yoast SEO automatically generates XML sitemaps for your website, making it easier for search engines like Google to find and index your content. These sitemaps automatically update as you add or remove pages, so you don’t have to do any manual work. Additionally, Yoast SEO gives you easy access to your website’s robots.txt file. The plugin allows you to view or edit this file to control which parts of your website are allowed to be crawled by search engines. Both features help search engines discover your content while giving you more control over your site’s visibility.

Thanks to Yoast SEO, you can now quickly add an llms.txt file to your website at no additional cost to guide AI systems to your most valuable content. This simple text file helps AI tools efficiently identify and prioritize important pages to ensure they focus on what is most important to your website.

Manage your content

As you write more and more content for your website, you’ll be looking for easy ways to manage it! Yoast SEO plugin has some features that will help you manage your content well and avoid common SEO problems. For example, if you make changes like deleting a page or changing a URL and don’t know what you’re doing, problems can arise. And if you create a lot of similar pages, that can also be a problem because Google doesn’t know which page to redirect users to. To help you deal with such SEO problems, Yoast SEO has two indispensable tools: canonical URL tags and the Redirects tool.

Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs are really helpful when you have a lot of similar content, such as a webshop with multiple variants of the same product, each with its own page. To make your life easier, Yoast SEO automatically adds canonical tags to all content marked for indexing. All canonical tags are managed in the background; In most cases you don’t need to change anything. If you need to customize your canonical URL tags, it’s easy.

Manage redirects

Redirects are important when moving or removing content. The fact is that users are still likely to find their way to the old URL, but the content they expect isn’t there. Not only is this disappointing and frustrating for users, but it can also make it harder for Google to find and index your content. While advanced redirect management is part of Yoast SEO Premium, you can still make basic changes using WordPress Settings or other free plugins.

Create your site structure and internal links

If you want discoverable content that really ranks, you need to take care of your website structure and internal linking. The Yoast SEO plugin has a few tools to help you manage how your content is linked to each other: There is a text link counter that tells you how many inbound and outbound internal links there are on a page, as well as an internal link suggestion tool in Yoast SEO Premium (in editor view) that can help you add more if necessary. These features help you build a strong website structure and ensure your important content is easy for visitors and search engines to find.

Even more technical features from Yoast SEO

By simply installing the plugin and following the steps in our configuration training, you will already fix many important technical SEO issues for your website! We take care of these steps for you, so you don’t have to know every little technical detail.

If you really want to know what Yoast SEO can do for you, then take a look at the full list of features. Additionally, if you are (a little more) knowledgeable about technical SEO, you might enjoy reading about Yoast SEO’s hidden features that will secretly improve your SEO!

Read more: Things we don’t do at Yoast SEO and why »

Learn SEO by doing SEO with Yoast

Do you still need to learn something about SEO? One of the biggest benefits of using the Yoast plugins is that they make it super easy to get started and learn! We’ll give you pointers to help you get it right, as well as links to learn more about how SEO works and how to implement it.

If you’d like to learn more about SEO, we also offer free training and resources in our Yoast SEO Academy and on our SEO blog. You can start with these basics to understand how SEO works and get more out of your website over time.

A quick summary

In this article, we showed you what Yoast SEO can do for your website. Our plugin helps you improve the SEO of your content by helping you set a key phrase and telling you exactly how to optimize your content to rank for that key phrase. The plugin also helps you improve the readability of your content by providing feedback that you can easily incorporate into your own writing style. And last but not least, the Yoast plugin improves your technical SEO by doing a lot of technical things in the background.

Everything above is available in Yoast SEO’s free plugin, making it a good starting point for most WordPress users. If you ever want advanced tools, you can always explore Yoast SEO Premium and its additional features.

Edwin Toonen

Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked at a top web design magazine, where he developed a strong understanding of how to create great content.

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