It’s important that (potential) customers can find our website easily. And Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key! It’s the most effective way of maximizing the number of new visitors to your website. We believe that the Yoast WordPress plugin can give every WordPress website a helping hand. Curious? Find out more in our blog…
Search engine optimization
Do you want to lead more traffic to your website? Then you need to ensure your site appears high on the list of results returned by Google searches. Almost all web users make use of Google or something similar. So search engine optimization – also known as SEO – is crucial to attracting more visitors. The Yoast WordPress plugin is one of the tools that we use to maximize SEO.
But what is SEO? It’s a term that describes the process used to ensure your web page has a high ranking in a web search engine’s organic search results. Organic search results are the unpaid results that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, rather than because of paid advertisements. The more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.
The SEO process
In recent years, there has been a revolution in the field of SEO. Websites previously relied on using a variety of ‘tricks’ to achieve a high search engine ranking. But as Google becomes more sophisticated, it is more important to create a good site, and high quality content.
You can achieve this by concentrating on a number of guidelines when creating web pages:
- Content: firstly, ensure there’s a clear structure and good use of relevant keywords. The keywords need to be included at strategic locations. This helps search engines to know the context and meaning of each page.
- Link building: secondly, try and get as many backlinks (ie. incoming links to your webpages from other sites) as possible. A page with a lot of backlinks ranks higher on search engines, as it makes your content appear authoritative. Also make sure your page contains links to external websites, and other pages within your site or domain.
- Technology: finally, make sure your website performs well. For example, in terms of pagespeed and responsive design.
The Yoast WordPress plugin lends a helping hand
For SEO to be effective, it needs to be an ongoing, consistent process. We use the Yoast WordPress plugin to manage all our page content. Yoast provides a continuous insight into how well a page has been optimized for Google – and other search engines. The plugin has been developed by a rapidly growing startup – Yoast. Their objective is to help people improve their websites. Alongside the Yoast WordPress plugin, they provide articles, newsletters, eBooks, and training.
Green means go!
Of course, adopting the Yoast WordPress plugin does not mean you automatically rank higher in search results. It’s a tool that helps you on your way. It helps you to appraise and organize your content more effectively. And by doing so, you will improve the search engine ranking of your site. The plugin mainly focuses on content-related aspects, providing you with immediate feedback on the quality of your content. Yoast employs color-coded icons that help you check how your page scores for a particular factor. A red dot means you still need to make some improvements. Orange means there’s still room for improvement. And green means go – the page will have a good SEO score.
Your specified keyword or key phrase is the basis of the SEO check. The Yoast plugin looks to see if you have used the keyword on the website before. Yoast also checks how often the keyword is used in the text. Just as importantly, you should include the keyword in each part of the page, such as the page title. And you will ideally repeat the keyword in one or more sub headings. Finally, the images you use should also include the keyword as an attribute.
The Yoast plugin evaluates your page using a number of other factors as well. For example, the number of words you use in the content is important – a minimum of 300 words is the optimum. Yoast looks too at whether you have included enough links in the text. The URL slug and the Meta description are also evaluated. The Yoast plugin helps you take all these aspects into account. Once all the lights are on green your content has been SEO-proofed, so you can achieve optimum results.
Let BSL help improve your website!
BSL has skilled and experienced personnel to do this for you! If you would like BSL to improve your website, we would love to hear from you to discuss the possibilities. Just get in touch!
