Kim Avery Coaching

SEO Basics – My Favorite SEO Plugin

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SEO pluginIf you Google SEO Plugin for WordPress, you’ll get millions of results. And in an effort to be totally transparent here, I have to admit that I haven’t tested all of them. But of the ones I have tested, my favorite is “WordPress SEO by Yoast.”

There are several features that make me a fan, and I’ll outline them below.

Meta Description

We haven’t talked about the meta description tag, but among other things, it is the sentence or two that appears in the search results under the title and URL of a listing. It is important to have the key word in the meta description tag, and sometimes you just can’t work it into the first paragraph of your post.

This plugin allows you to create exactly what you want to show up — something that may be more relevant to your topic than the actual first sentence or paragraph (which you have carefully crafted for interest).

Another added bonus is that sometimes Google will just pull random content from a page if you don’t tell it what should it should choose by having a specific meta description. And sometimes that can get ugly. This feature is very important to me.

Snippet Preview

Going right along with the meta description is the snippet preview. Yoast lets you see exactly what your listing will look like when the search engine finds your page. Nice.

Focus Keyword and Page Analysis

As we discussed previously, you should have one primary keyword for each blog post or page. When you enter this into the interface and save your draft, the plugin shows you whether or not you have used the keyword in all the important areas.

Additionally, there is a separate tab for the Page Analysis. This gives you information about other SEO considerations, and makes suggestions about things like outbound links, images, keyword density, reading level, and length of the page title.

Robots and Redirects

And then it lets you easily perform a couple of tasks that you don’t use very often, but when you need them, the plugin more than pays for itself (… don’t worry — it’s FREE).

Sometimes there are pages that you don’t want to be indexed. In other words, you don’t want somebody to be able to find them in the search engine. For example, suppose you have a thank you page with a download link — in order to get there, people need to sign up for your free gift. You don’t want that showing up in the search engines. This plugin gives you an easy way to “hide” the page. Very handy.

The other thing it will do is let you redirect from one page to another. Again, not something you need to do often, but when you do, it is a very helpful feature.

What is your favorite SEO plugin? Leave me a comment and let me know why you like it.

2 Comments

  1. Miranda Harver

    The Meta Description is something that’s highly valuable for me, too. I write as creatively as I can and indeed, that could mean that the keywords are not on the first sentence of my post – not on the first paragraph even. This feature allows me to keep on playing things up.

    • Susan Fleming

      Thanks for that reinforcement, Miranda. Sometimes creativity does conflict with SEO, but what a great thing to be able to compensate for it and get the best of both worlds.