What is Yoast SEO and How Does It Work?

Yoast SEO is one of the most used tools worldwide to help the proper indexing of your website and its pages in search engines. Start using it today.

Yoast SEO is a plugin used by millions of websites around the world since 2008, in order to help these sites to position themselves in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, among others. Here we will tell you what it is, what it is for, how it works and its main characteristics.

What is Yoast SEO?

It is a plugin or extension created for some content management systems or CMS such as WordPress and designed as a tool to improve all possible aspects of the organic positioning (SEO) of your website, in addition to optimizing, analyzing and enriching the content in your pages and articles.

It was created by the company Yoast BV and is used by both SEO experts and people with a basic understanding of web positioning.

What platforms does Yoast SEO work on? 

Although this plugin was born as a WordPress plugin, its effectiveness and popularity led its developers to make other extensions such as:

Yoast SEO WordPress. According to WordPress.org, this extension has more than 5 million downloads , a high rating with five stars and is regularly updated. It offers two versions: one free and one premium.

Magento 2. In conjunction with the Maxserver company, this plugin was made in order to improve the readability of the content in this e-commerce.

NEOS. Through this CMS, Yoast SEO works as an open source Javascript plugin and helps to analyze the content of the platform.

TYPO3. This extension is for the TYPO3 CMS, and serves to obtain a better ranking of web positioning in search engines, in addition to offering content analysis to increase its readability on pages and articles. It has a free option and a premium option.

What are the characteristics of Yoast SEO? 

To define each of them, we must first separate them into their two current versions:

Free version 

• Optimize keywords . You have access to power only one keyword.
• It helps to specify if you want both your pages and your blog posts to be indexed. Or, both for their positioning in the search engines.
• It gives you a preview of what the link preview of the search result of your page or article in Google would look like.
• Analyze the readability of the content to give your own score called Flesh Reading Ease. 
• Allows you to enable tracking of breadcrumbs or breadcrumbs. In other words, it makes it easier for the user to navigate and improves their experience on your website.
• It works in different types of content editors within WordPress.
• It gives you the option to specify which categories or labels you want to position. For example, in a pet e-commerce, place some products such as with the keywords “Dog food” and “Cat food” to differentiate and facilitate their search.
• Helps detect duplicate content, keep WordPress Yoast sitemap clean, and URL permalinks.

Yoast SEO Premium

This version has the same benefits as the free version, but with some extra distinctions such as:

• It gives you access to incorporate keywords, synonyms and related phrases in all ways and without limitation.
• It gives you a preview of what the link preview of the search result would look like on Google and social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
• It provides in CSV formats an overview of keywords and SEO score.
• It gives you suggestions for links to other pages on your website, all this while you’re writing it.
• It’s ad-free and you have one year of 24/7 access to technical support.
• Help redirect old pages to current links.
• Its cost is  $ 89 for a site , and for each additional website, it offers additional discounts.
• Analyze up to five words or phrases, when making a new page or article, in order to check if there are matches of previous keywords.

How to install Yoast SEO in WordPress? 

On the left side of your WordPress desktop there is an option that says “Plugins”, click. Once the page appears, at the top, you must select the “Add New” button.

A new screen will appear where you will have a search engine to find the plugin. Then you must put “SEO” or “Yoast SEO” and it will come out. To finish, you click on the “Install now” tab.

  Now you will have a new tab on the left side with the name “SEO”. For configuration, you must go to that section, click “general”. Once inside, select the part that says “Yoast SEO setup wizard”.

And ready. A new window will appear that will easily tell you how to continue with the configuration.

What other secondary plugins does Yoast SEO have? 

At the moment, all its extra extensions are only for WordPress like:

SEO video. It helps to increase the appearance and search of your videos on your website, in addition to showing them more easily on Google. Finally, it allows you to embed them into pages and articles through fitvids.js.

WooCommerce SEO. This plugin was designed to optimize an online store and generate a cleaner WordPress Yoast XML sitemap or sitemap. Similarly, it helps to make your products easier to find in your e-commerce.

Local SEO. Displays local search results and Google Maps. It also helps you add a route planner.

News SEO. This extension generates a WordPress Yoast XML news sitemap to be identified by Google News. In addition to adding information to the board and indicating the gender in the articles.