What is Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin, formerly called “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. If you have a WordPress website, or are thinking about building one, you definitely need this plugin. SEO, or search engine optimization, is used in order to get search engines like Google to notice your site. This plugin lays out a comprehensive guide to SEO, in order to optimize your website.

Yoast SEO for Readability

Yoast SEO has made blogging, and writing for websites in general, much simpler. It is a SEO tool that helps you create the best website or blog possible. This plugin tells you your word count, sentence length, passive voice, transition words, and more. It helps ensure that you are writing clearly for the web. Readability is important not only for SEO, but for users as well. The better your site reads, the more likely people will use it.

Yoast SEO also allows you to categorize your posts. Now, you can do that on any blog. But with Yoast, you can put a post in two different categories, making one the primary category. This allows more content to be viewed by users who might be only interested in one category.

Yoast SEO for Search Engines

Aside from what we’ve already mentioned, Yoast SEO has many more SEO tools. Unlike other plugins, this SEO plugin allows you to add custom meta descriptions for search engines, titles, and keywords. This meta information is what search engines look for (the keyword) and display (the description and title). This way, you can see what an actual Google search result will look like for your site. It also notifies search engines immediately when you put up new content.

Overall, Yoast SEO is one of WordPress’s best plugins. Here at Union Square Design, we use this tool for our own website, as well as the ones we design. Better yet, this plugin is free to use, so go grab it for your own WordPress site!