You’ll learn about how to set up and use the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin so it makes SEO even easier. Yoast SEO is a powerful tool and also is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for search engine optimization (SEO). It helps website owners optimize their content, meta tags, and overall site structure to improve search engine rankings and attract more organic traffic.
By following best practices and leveraging Yoast SEO’s features, you can improve your site’s visibility, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately achieve better search engine rankings.
Market Share Comparison of Various Search Engines Using Yoast SEO Analysis
Currently, Google maintains a dominant market share in the search engine sector globally. In 2024, Google controls approximately 91% of the global search market. This percentage reflects its continued preeminence over competitors such as Bing, Yahoo!, and others.
This dominant position is due to several factors, including the quality and accuracy of its search algorithms, its vast technological infrastructure, and its ability to effectively integrate new developments in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies into its platform.
Yandex represents 60% of search traffic but only in Russia because worldwide it does not even reach 1% (less than one percent) (only 0.55%). Baidu takes the lead in China, with a market share of 76% in that country alone, this leadership being not because it is very good but due to access restrictions (imposed by the Chinese government) to other international search engines like Google. At a global level, this Chinese search engine, like the Russian one, has a very limited participation and almost the same percentage, 0.59% (less than 1%). Some users may use a more privacy-oriented search engine, such as DuckduckGo or Startpage.
Research your audience to find out what search engine they might be willing to use. Of course, in many countries, Google is the default search engine. But this may not be the case everywhere.
User Focus
It is important to note that you should focus primarily on your users and their experience on your website. Google wants to show its users the best result, so focus on providing it.
Remember, a comprehensive approach to SEO means you need to focus on everything.
- You need to think about proper keyword research, where you delve into what words and queries your target audience uses and how you can use that information to reach them.
- Good technical SEO, so that, for example, visitors do not find links that do not work or have to wait years for a page to load.
- A great user experience, isn’t it annoying having to scroll down a page to click an important button? Or when the website is cluttered and unclear? Let’s fix that.
- Write quality content that is original and that provides your site visitor with an answer to their question.
- A strong social media strategy to help reach new audiences and potential partnerships.
- Mobile optimization, let’s face it, most people use their phone all the time. It’s a missed opportunity not to include mobile optimization in your thought process.
- Security, HTTPS certification, and other security measures help build trust in your message and experience.
- And don’t forget accessibility: everyone deserves to be able to easily access your content, whether they are visually impaired or unable to navigate your site with a mouse, for example.
Installing Yoast SEO
- Navigate to the Plugins Section: Log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to the “Plugins” section.
- Search for Yoast SEO: In the search bar, type “Yoast SEO” and hit enter.
- Install and Activate: Find the Yoast SEO plugin in the search results and click on “Install Now.” Once installed, click on “Activate” to activate the plugin.
- Setup Wizard: Upon activation, Yoast SEO will guide you through a setup wizard to configure basic settings for your site’s SEO. Follow the prompts to set up your site’s title, meta description, and other essential SEO elements.
Free Yoast SEO Features
Like a vast majority of IT companies, Yoast SEO is no exception and offers a free and a paid version.
It doesn’t matter if you are a large company or a small website. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to rank in search engines. And that’s why we offer two versions of our Yoast SEO plugin: a paid version, which we call Premium, and a free one.
We know how valuable your time is and that is why we will explain many functions briefly and quickly.
Analysis available in Yoast SEO
Our plugin helps you write your text (content) of any topic in the right way for search engine optimization. It comes with three types of analysis:
- SEO analysis helps you optimize your text for SEO.
- Readability analysis helps you make your text easier to read.
- And inclusive language analysis helps you write more inclusive content.
Let’s focus on SEO analysis first. How does it work? Well, first you need to fill in your focus key phrase, i.e. the term for which you want your text to rank in search engines.
Keyword Research
It is always recommended that you do a little keyword research before starting to write any Page or Post on your Website. You need to know what people are looking for, because otherwise you won’t be able to give them the answers and solutions they need. And that makes it much more difficult to classify. However, keyword research can be quite complicated.
To make things a little easier for you, there are free tools like Google Keyword Planner or paid ones like Semrush, one of the largest SEO tool providers out there. This feature allows you to quickly find key phrases related to your focus key phrase. And you also get access to a ton of useful metrics, like search volume, competition, and trends for a specific key phrase.
If you upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium, you can even go one step further. While Yoast SEO Free helps you optimize for a single focus key phrase; Yoast SEO Premium also helps you optimize related key phrases and synonyms.
SEO Analysis
But let’s go back to the SEO analysis. Once you’ve entered your focus keyphrase, we perform several checks on your content. A lot of them have to do with your key phrase: did you use it in your title, your introduction, your headings? Did you use it often enough or maybe too often?
We give you feedback on all of these things. The green, orange and red traffic lights indicate what you did well and what you need to improve. The comments that come with traffic lights tell you exactly how you can improve your text. In addition to keyphrase checks, SEO analysis also gives you feedback on your links, images, and snippet elements. In other words: we tell you exactly how you can improve your content from an SEO perspective.
Readability Analysis
Our second analysis, the readability analysis, provides feedback from a different perspective. But why should you care about readability? I’ll tell you why: because it’s important to your visitors. Reading on a screen is difficult and people get distracted quickly.
But the most important thing is that you want people to understand what you are writing. You want to convey your message. Nobody likes to read something that is incomprehensible, boring or full of keywords.
If you write text that people don’t understand, you won’t help them find what they need. In the end, that’s also bad for your SEO. That’s why we help you write clear and easy-to-read texts. The readability analysis performs many checks and we base them on extensive research.
For example, our commenting system will alert you if your text contains too many sentences or long paragraphs. Or it will recommend that you use more titles or transition words. Just to name a few things.
Inclusive Language Analysis
Then we have the analysis of inclusive language. We offer this analysis because it is surprisingly easy to exclude people by accidentally using incorrect words. Our analysis detects words that people may find harmful and offers alternatives to consider. Inclusive language analysis is optional, so it will not be enabled by default. You can decide for yourself if you want to use it.
Yoast SEO is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to optimize your website for search engines. It facilitates the creation of highly visible and engaging content, enhances your ranking on SERPs, and strengthens the technical structure of your site. With advanced tools for keyword analysis, meta tag optimization, and automatic XML sitemap generation, Yoast SEO empowers users to achieve and maintain outstanding SEO performance.