Yoast SEO is one the most-used plugin for search engine optimization (SEO). With more than 5 million downloads and a 4.7-star rating, Yoast SEO is one of the most loved and widely trusted SEO plugins across the WordPress community. If you are not using Yoast SEO yet, then you probably don’t know the benefits of using Yoast SEO. Therefore, in this blog post, we are going to list the top ten benefits of using Yoast SEO.
1. Improve Content SEO
Website content optimization has two fundamental purposes. First, to present content in a way such that search engine likes it. Second, to engage the audience in obtaining higher website traffic and business growth. Here are the ways in which Yoast SEO will help you in content optimization:
● Ensures proper internal linking in your blog post.
● Helps in the optimization of images.
● Advises you to add main keywords in the title, subheading, and URL.
● Maintains decent keyword density.
● Helps to maintain optimal title length.
● Inspects no follow and normal backlinks.
● Ensures that your post has more than three hundred words.
● Suggests you to add focus keywords in the first paragraph.
2. Enhance Readability
Just optimizing the content for the search engine is not enough. One has to pay equal attention to engaging visitors also. Here is how Yoast SEO helps you to optimize the content to improve readability.
● Limits passive voice usage to ten percent.
● Helps you to avoid word repetition.
● Provides readability scores.
● Discourages lengthy paragraphs.
● Ensures your paragraphs contain thirty percent transition words.
3. Web Page Preview
Want to know how your web page looks like on search engine results page? Yoast SEO plugin can help you. It shows how your search result looks when your customer searches for your products or services. Furthermore, this SEO plugin will notify if the length of your title or meta description is too short or too long so that you can edit it to ensure the search engine requirements are met. That’s how Yoast SEO plays an important role in improving organic click-through rates.
4. Generate XML Sitemaps Automatically
A sitemap is used to inform about the web pages that are ready for crawling. It is one of the basic needs of a website to ensure proper indexing. Here the beauty of this SEO plugin is that it creates XML sitemaps automatically and ensures smooth indexing. To make use of this feature you need to enable it. To generate your sitemap automatically, go to XML site functionality and click on “enabled.”
5. Effortless Social Media Sharing
Yoast SEO provides a wide range of features and benefits to cover a larger ground in search engine optimization. One of those features is, it provides an option to customize and share snippets on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This feature comes in handy in engaging social media audience. You might already know that people on social media have a very limited attention span. Therefore, Yoast SEO provides an option to add the different title, description, and images to attract your audience on social media for better SEO and SMM.
6. Hustle Free Import And Export Of Settings
Importing Settings: If you are currently using some other plugin and want to shift to Yoast SEO, then import and export features are a lifesaver for you. With Yoast plugin, you can easily import the settings from the previously used plugin. As the result, a lot of time and energy are saved.
Exporting Settings: If you have created a new blog, and want to make same SEO settings on your new online presence, then you don’t need to install and set up the Yoast plugin once again. Yoast SEO provides an option to export the settings from your current site and import it to the new blog.
7. Easy Website verification
Submitting your new website to popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex etc. is one of the best practices in search engine optimization. That’s exactly where Yoast SEO helps you. With Yoast SEO, you can effortlessly verify the ownership of your website. It provides a feature to add meta tags provided by various search engines to confirm the ownership of your online presence.
8. Mark cornerstone content
what is cornerstone content? Cornerstone content pieces are the best articles which reflect your business and mission. In other words, they are the articles which you want to rank higher in the search engine results page, and also want your website visitors to read them. Define cornerstone content for your website with Yoast SEO plugin. All you have to do is tick the checkbox which says, “This article is cornerstone content.” And everything else is taken care by the Yoast SEO plugin.
9. Detect Indexable Problems
Yoast SEO uses OnPage.org integration to detect indexable issues. This is a default feature of the Yoast plugin. When you install and configure Yoast plugin, it automatically checks if your site is indexable by Google, and notifies you on the dashboard, if any issues are found. If you encounter any indexable issues, fix them as soon as possible to avoid search engine traffic loss.
10. Configure Nofollow, Noindex, and Canonical URL
With Yoast SEO plugin you can easily configure Nofollow, Noindex, and Canonical URL. This is one of the technical benefits of using Yoast SEO for search engine optimization.
Nofollow: A Nofollow tag tells the search engine not to follow the links on a page. All the WordPress links are Dofollow by default. Using Yoast you can easily make your post links Nofollow.
Noindex: Noindex links are those web pages in your website that you don’t want Google to index. Yoast plugin gives you an option to convert specific pages in your website into No-index pages.
Canonical URL: A canonical URL is used to manage cross-domain duplicate content. With Yoast SEO, you can configure the canonical URL and prevent “duplicate content issues.”