If you have a WordPress website, you will have used the Yoast SEO plugin to optimise your website at some point. Not only is this fantastic plugin-free, but it is a gateway to expanding the already awesome functionality of WordPress, making it possible to do simple but clever little things such as adding unique page titles, meta descriptions, open graph metadata, robots tags, and much, much more.
The all-important green light.
You may be familiar with the traffic light system within the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin and you should always aim to secure that precious green light within your website pages and posts.
By displaying that magical little green bullet, you are apparently demonstrating to your users and visitors that the content within your website is ‘perfectly optimised’. However this is more than a little misleading because there is no such thing as a perfectly optimised website.
Why there is more to SEO than Yoast.
We are going to refer you straight to this Digital Studios blog post we did about why SEO is a serious commitment in terms of continuous time and effort, and why you are never guaranteed to hit the Google top spot (other search engines are available).
In an extension of this commonly held misbelief, the inclusion of the all-important green light within your website display is sadly not a shortcut to achieving a top ten Google ranking either. For one thing, there is no such thing as a ranking guarantee and no software or marketing provider should be making any promises to you on that. If someone tells you it is possible….run away….fast. Even Yoast themselves admit that you should not always aim for the green light and claim that “this is merely an indication, and not a necessity”. There are just too many factors to take into consideration, not to mention hundreds of Google ranking factors.
So how do I improve my SEO and what can Yoast do for me?
There may well be no such thing as perfect optimisation but you can certainly try your best by following Yoast best practice and by keeping up-to-date with SEO tips and related news from reputable sources.
The most important thing is to make sure that your content is the best that it can be and if it’s not where you want it to be, devote some time to making it high quality, relevant and above all, of use to your audience. Consider investing in the necessary resources to manage this for you, if you’re struggling to cover this off yourself.
And finally…
There are so many variables when it comes to performing perfect SEO and unfortunately, using Yoast alone will not achieve it all. Sure, Yoast can help you in making sure your keywords appear in the right places (in the obvious areas such as title, headlines, meta descriptions, content body, URL, etc.) but that’s only a small part of what SEO is about. The Yoast SEO plugin is fantastic, but it can’t replace the knowledge, experience and skills of an SEO professional. It is often used by those in the SEO profession as it makes it possible to control SEO elements such as page titles, meta descriptions, robots tags and URLs but this does not mean that the plugin alone can get you great ranking results.
As with everything, human input is required to balance out the advantages that tech can offer. If this concept is of interest to you, or you’re still feeling like we are speaking a foreign language and you need some more targeted support, why not speak to one of our helpful human beings at The Digital Studios, who will be able to clue you in and will help you to move forwards?
