Yoast

What is Yoast?  

Yoast is a WordPress plugin that we use to help improve our sites’ search engine optimization, or SEO. This is important because Google picks up certain aspects of a site and categorizes it based on this information. Think of how you search for things in Google. It is typically something keyword based like “dog veterinarian” or “how to make french toast”. You want your site to contain this language so that Google can read and index you based on these phrases. 

Something to note, in the past keyword stuffing was a popular trend. This means that you would just litter your site with every keyword you could possibly think of, some not even related to your business, in the hopes that the keywords would be picked up by Google and you would move up the ranks to the number one spot. Well Google caught on to this trend and put a stop to it. Keyword stuffing will no longer help you and, in fact, can get you blacklisted so no one will find your site.  

This is where Yoast becomes very helpful.  

What Yoast Provides 

Yoast allows for an easy to navigate system, giving you clear cut areas to input the correct information while offering suggestions along the way.  

By default, Yoast will take the information that has been put on a page and use it to complete title tags, meta descriptions, and featured images. While default info can help rankings, you should be updating these items for every page, post, and category on your site to really reap the full benefits of Yoast. 

Yoast puts all this information in an easy to edit field on each page, post, and category. You should see something that looks like this: 

What We Provide 

During the intake process the customer would have answered some questions about copywriting. This information is also used in the SEO set up. Our copywriting team generates the SEO Titles, Meta Descriptions, and H1 tags for the pages.  

During the build, the builder will then go in and add this information to each page as well as a featured image. This is the extent of what we provide for our new builds in WDS, but Yoast offers a lot of features that can really benefit the customer.  

To learn a little more about Yoast and SEO please visit the plugin Documentation here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/