Creating quality content and mastering how to use YOAST SEO Plugin to optimize the content for Search Engines is a must-know and understand process to help blogs and content creators get the best from their efforts.

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Installing the YOAST SEO Plugin and failing to make good use of it is like having a million dollars in your account and not getting any returns from it. In this article, I will be sharing my experiences, strategies, and tips I have picked up along the way from being a novice in Search Engine Optimization to mastering the skills from reading and watching SEO tutorials on YouTube.

If you want to improve the visibility of your content on the web, the first thing you should consider is the loading speed and Core Web Vitals of the website. I will attempt to explain that in detail in another article, but in this, we shall concentrate on “How to Use YOAST SEO Plugin to optimize content.”

To be able to use the YOAST plugin, you would have to install the plugin on your WordPress site. “The Yoast SEO plugin helps you rank higher by providing you with tools that ensure that your site meets the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to optimize your content for SEO and overall readability.” according to YOAST

Before using the YOAST SEO Plugin to Optimize Content for Search Engines, do the following

#1. SEO Written Content Title

If your intention is to improve organic traffic, site ranking, and visibility, work on your title. The title of each post must be well crafted and contain the keywords you want to rank for. Using this content as a case study, the intention of this post is to rank for how to use YOAST SEO Plugin to Optimize Content and how content creators and bloggers can Optimize Content for Search Engines. This particular content should be able to rank for using YOAST Plugin to Optimize Content. As you can see from the title, it contains the keywords that should drive search questions and organic traffic each time someone uses a combination of these words. Since YOAST Plugin is also a popular SEO plugin, the chances of this content being useful for many readers is high.

The title of your post is the first way of getting noticed. Do your own research and identify keywords you want to rank for. A typical place to do that is Google’s Keyword Planner.

#2. The introduction must be SEO compliant

Content creators and bloggers must master the art of creating very good introductory paragraphs for every content. The paragraph must contain the keywords you want to rank for so that the YOAST SEO Plugin installed on your site will be leveraged to support your effort. Let the readers know what the content is about briefly in your first few sentences. I have seen many blogs failing to do this nearly all the time. If your first sentences cannot tell what the content is about, your content will get lost and will not rank even if you install the plugin and the content gets indexed.

#3 Use Header 2, 3, etc in breaking your content into themes and ideas

As practicable as possible, do well to break the content into sub-themes, and for each sub-theme, create a subheading for it. This helps in easy reading and your readers get to know what they should expect in the next set of facts shared. As you can see in this content, each time I write a new detail about how to rank or use the YOAST plugin, I use headings. It is good practice to have subheadings, and ensure that one of the subheadings contains the keywords you want to rank for. Just before the explanations of what you need to do to make good use of your YOAST Plugin, we have a subheading “Before using the YOAST SEO Plugin to Optimize Content for Search Engines, do the following”.

#4. Compress your images before uploading them to the site

The faster your web pages load for visitors, the better your site and its ranking. It also helps to keep visitors. If the site loads slowly, the visitors will leave after a few seconds. One of the ways to ensure the site loads faster is to do the basic things, which include compressing your images before uploading them to the site. One place on the internet to compress images for free is compressjpeg.com.

If you really want to make good use of the YOAST SEO Plugin to Optimize Content for Search Engines, do your best to compress the images.

#5. Have Internal and External Links

Internal and external links add to your SEO score when using YOAST SEO Plugin, hence do well to have them in each post. The internal links are other stories on your site which are related to the one you are publishing. They keep readers on your site to read more. External links direct your readers to other relevant and useful sites for further reading and resources. A typical example of an external link in this explanatory post is the compressjpeg.com site for working on images. For this particular content, the best internal link on this site is Search Engine Optimization: All SEO questions answered for 2023

#6. Focus Keyphrase and YOAST SEO

The Yoast Plugin required that you input the keyword phrase you want to rank for. According to YOAST SEO, “The focus keyword or keyphrase is the search term you want a page or post to rank for most. When people search for that phrase, they should find you. If you set a focus keyphrase for a page with Yoast SEO in WordPress or Shopify, the plugin or app evaluates the page’s content and provides feedback on how to improve the content to increase your chances of ranking higher for that search term.” Do well to enter the keywords you want to rank for in this section of your plugin.

#7 Write SEO Image Alt Text

When you upload your compressed image, i.e. feature image and any other images for content. Do well to name the image with the keyword phrase and use the same or the title of the post which contains the keyword phrase as the name of the image and the Alt Text. This further improves the SEO score in Yoast.

#8. Enter your keyphrase, SEO Title and Meta Tag

Enter your keyphrase and its synonyms that you want to rank for. You can check from your Plugin’s insight section to know the kind words your content is most likely to rank for. With this, you can make changes if needed to help improve the content. However, if you know the keywords you want to rank for, and you follow the rules and tips provided in this article, the words in the insight section of the YOAST plugin will often match the words to rank for.

The information in the YOAST SEO plugin insight section reads, “The following words and word combinations occur the most in the content. These give an indication of what your content focuses on. If the words differ a lot from your topic, you might want to rewrite your content accordingly.” Find below that of this content.

Your SEO title should contain the keywords you want to rank for. The indicator for this must also turn green.

Work on a Meta Tag for the content. This must tell the would-be reader exactly what the content is about. If paragraph one of the content is well written, you can copy and paste it into the Meta Tag section and work on it until the indicator turns green.

#9. Check grammar, spelling, and punctuation

Even the most informed writer should not publish without checking the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in posts. This can be done with the help of free online tools such as languagetool.org

If you do all the above your optimization of the content should yield positive results and the indicators must turn green throughout.

#10. Manually index content

After publishing the blog post, go ahead and manually index the content via the Google Search Console. This ensures that you instruct or request Google crawlers to visit the site instantly to queue the content for indexing. Manually indexing helps ensure your content is indexed quickly.

In addition to reading this article, do well to check out the following top-class information from YOAST. All the suggestions in this post have been applied to this post and if you find this write-up through a search query on a search engine such as Google, it means the suggestions in this post actually work. Do your best to put them into practice for every post you publish.

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