The most common online open source creation tool for your website, that is written in PHP is WordPress. The chances that your are using WordPress to run your website are pretty high. To explain it simply, WordPress is the easiest and also the most powerful website and blogging content management system that exists. If you want your website to have good rankings on search engines, you need to have an SEO plugin. What are WordPress plugins?
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While the WordPress is pretty powerful and useful, there are various of different WordPress plugins that you can use to improve your productivity and functionality of your WordPress site. WordPress plugins are small software that can be uploaded to your WordPress site, so that you can extend the functionality of that particular WordPress site.
There are millions of different WordPress SEO plugins that you can choose from. Some of those plugins are free, and some of them are premium - plugins that you have to pay for. The obvious difference when comparing free and premium plugins is their quality and functionality. The premium plugins usually offer a full time support from the staff and developers that work the maintenance, security and compatibility of that particular WordPress SEO plugin. One more special feature that premium SEO plugins offer, is the possibility to contact the customer support if there is a code of that WordPress SEO plugin that starts misbehaving with other WordPress plugins that you are using.
You might be thinking now, what can WordPress SEO plugins really do? The answer to this question is - anything that you can imagine. When the choice for the perfect WordPress SEO plugin is so hard, you might need some help when choosing the perfect one for your website. That's why we are here.
In our opinion, Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins that you should start using as soon as possible on your WordPress site. We have been using various of WordPress SEO plugins, and after a lot of thought and consideration, we are absolutely sure that Yoast SEO plugin is the best one out there. With this plugin you can get more visitors from the leading search engines, like Google and Bing. You will be capable of attracting more visitors from your social media channels. One of the more important things is that you will be able to increase the engagement of your readers on your WordPress site. Let's go into more details what does Yoast SEO plugin offer to their customers.
Yoast SEO plugin comes in two different versions- free and premium. Even though the free version is not as powerful as the premium version, it still packs a decent punch. We do suggest to use the premium version if you can afford it, but if you can't, you shouldn't have any problems with the free version either.
In Yoast SEO plugin, you can input the keyword you would like to use in your post or page, that you want to rank for in the search engine results pages. The bonus that the premium version offers is that you can also add related keywords or even synonyms.
After that, the Yoast SEO plugin will check your content to see how often do you use that particular word, and if it's on the right places of the article. In the free version, you can only use one focus keyword, so if you don't plan to get the premium version, you should use it wisely.
Yoast makes it easy to seduce the search engines, so you WordPress website ranks as high as possible on the search engine results page.
One of the amazing features that Yoast offers, is the ability to see your website page from the perspective of the Google user. This feature offers you a ton of possibilities on improving your rankings. If you are a user that is looking for a particular website, would you click on your website? What do you like about the preview of your website? What are the things that you don't like, the things that you want to change? What about mobiles users, does it look good enough? You can get answer to all of these questions with Yoast. The free version only offers the preview of your link in Google, while the premium version also offers the link preview for Facebook and Twitter.
The most annoying thing about breadcrumbs is that they can get pretty messy, and there are several reasons why this happens. One of the most common issues with breadcrumbs is that your post can be sorted in several categories, which would cause your post to appear with different breadcrumbs. The solution to this problem is pretty simple, if you are using Yoast SEO plugin. With Yoast you can simply set the primary category for any of your posts, and also determine the taxonomy of every page on your particular WordPress site.
A lot of WordPress websites have problems with duplicate content issue. This happens when your website shows the exact same content on many different URLs. This particular problem causes confusion to Google, and makes further complications when trying to rank your WordPress site.
Yoast SEO plugin has a pretty simple solution to this problem. You can choose on URL and set it as the original - it will become a canonical link. What this solution does for you website is that all of your content regarding a particular keyword can be found under a specific URL. It won't be scattered around a bunch of URLs, and it won't cause confusion to Google crawlers.
In order to understand how Google ranks your website, you need to learn more about Google crawlers. You can see more about them here.
Yoast SEO plugin does another great thing, when it comes to Google web crawlers. It optimizes your WordPress website, and makes it super easy for them to crawl around it and get all of the necessary information.
If you are not a technical tweaking expert, this plugin makes it pretty easy for you. All of the technical stuff are done, without you even knowing about it. But if you like doing stuff yourself, there is also an option to adjust parameters. With Yoast SEO plugin, you have the ability to edit any of your files, like .htaccess files or robots.txt. You can also clean up any of your sites URLs and even generate new, or update old sitemaps for your WordPress site.
There would be no reason for the premium version of Yoast SEO plugin to exist, if it doesn't offer some amazing functionalities to its users. One of those functionalities is content insight. With content insight, you can see the 5 particular words, or 5 particular word combinations that have the highest appearance rate on your page.
With this information, you can easily check if those are the words that you want to rank for in any of the search engines. You don't want your article to have the wrong keywords, while trying to rank for other keywords. This feature is only available in the premium version, while you have to do this all by yourself in the free version.
It is always necessary to delete some of the pages on your WordPress site. When this happens, if your user visits the old page, he will get the 404 Not Found error.
This can be pretty frustrating, as this drives away traffic from your website. The simplest way to avoid this problem, is to redirect your users to a new page. This is where Yoast SEO plugin comes in handy. After deleting any of your pages, the redirect manager will ask you what should it do with the old URLs that have been deleted.
You can easily set new URLs to the pages where you want to redirect your users. You can see all of the options that the plugin offers in 'Redirects' menu. You can also set the 'REGEX redirects' to tell the plugin that all of the URLs that contain a particular word or expression, should be redirected to the page you chose.
One more of the great features that Yoast SEO plugin for premium users offers is exporting focus keywords. There is no longer a need to search your page for hours to find what keywords your optimized, and on what keywords you need to work more.
With just a few simple clicks, you can download an overview that shows you the list of all the keywords that you focus and used so far. Not only that, you get to choose what data you are most interested in seeing. Some of those options are URLs, keywords, title and readability score. After that, you can download the complete overview in a CSV file. This also works for content which has multiple focus keywords.
In our opinion, Yoast SEO plugin is the best plugin for search engine optimization of your WordPress site out there. There are a lot of other SEO plugins that you can try out, this doesn't meant that Yoast SEO plugin will work the best for you. The best way to determine which of the SEO plugins you should use is simple - give each one a shot. After you find the perfect one, there is no reason to search further, and we recommend that you try Yoast SEO plugin right now!
