When you compare the different WordPress SEO plugins, the Yoast SEO plugin comes out to be the best one. It is also one of the most powerful SEO plugins for WordPress sites. This post will look at the Yoast SEO plugin’s features, advantages, disadvantages, and price! But before that, we will discuss why anyone needs an SEO plugin for WordPress-
What is the exact need for an SEO plugin for a WordPress site?
WordPress follows the best coding techniques and generates HTML that is clean and complies with industry standards. As a result, it’s SEO-friendly right out of the box.
On the other hand, thousands of more websites compete for top rankings in search results for fewer keywords. This makes it more difficult for new websites to rank higher in search results.
An SEO plugin makes it simple to improve the performance of your website in search results. It assists with specifics that WordPress is unable to handle. Creating content, maintaining keywords, submitting sitemaps, and employing webmaster tools are just a few examples.
Yoast SEO has a lot of options that can help you optimize your website. Meta descriptions and keyword management, content analysis, duplicate content management, XML sitemaps, social features, rich snippets, and much more are all built-in.
Let’s take a look at some of Yoast SEO’s features, pricing, advantages, disadvantages now-
Yoast SEO Features
Yoast SEO provides a plethora of features to help you improve your SEO. Some of these capabilities impact the overall SEO of your site, while others assist you in optimizing specific articles and pages for search engines. The motto of Yoast is “SEO for everyone,” so you can use it for free to access all important SEO tools.
Create Better Content
On the post edit screen, this plugin provides a Yoast SEO meta box. You can use this meta box to add a meta description and titles to your blog article. It also helps you select a focus term for your article. Once you finalize the focus keyword, the Yoast SEO plugin evaluates the post’s content concerning the focus keyword. It then gives it an SEO score. It also suggests actions that can be taken to improve SEO scores. After using it over a few months, you will not need to check your SEO score as you will start executing those actions on your own. Having it there, though, allows you to check your work for SEO before publishing it.
It also performs a built-in readability score analysis that displays your content readability score. After that, you can change your content to make it appropriate for your users. It also offers multi-language support for the languages-
• Arabic
• Czech
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Indonesian
• Norwegian
• Russian
• Slovak
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
Easily Display/Hide Content to Search Engines
If you want to create a landing page for your ad campaign but don’t want it to appear in search results, you can use Yoast SEO Plugin. It will limit search engines by adding no-index to pages you don’t wish to be indexed.
Canonical link elements are added to your website by Yoast SEO. This helps search engines in determining which links to index. Your archive pages, for example, include content from your posts. Yoast SEO aids Google in recognizing that a post on archive pages has a canonical link to the original. It also lets you hide author archives on single-author blogs, tags, archive pages, and no-index categories posts.
Integration of XML Sitemaps and Search Console
You don’t need to install another plugin for XML Sitemaps if you use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Yoast SEO creates XML sitemaps for your website and uploads them to Google and Bing automatically.
You can also add XML sitemaps manually to your Webmaster Tools account. But wait, Yoast has also integrated Search Console into the dashboard. Without leaving your WordPress dashboard, you can also monitor how your site performs in search results.
Content Scrapers: How to Protect Your RSS Feed!
Some people have established scraper websites, which is one of the primary issues that many websites confront. These scraper websites use RSS feeds of other sites to curate material from all around the internet. They have software installed that uses RSS feeds of other websites to fetch material and publish it automatically. This could be harmful to your website because search engines may prioritize those sites.
Yoast SEO solves this issue by including a link with each RSS feed to your content. This effectively outperforms scrapers in search rankings by informing search engines of the original location of the content.
Easy Robots and .htaccess File Editing
You may need to check or inspect your site’s.htaccess and robots.txt files after regular intervals. These files are located in your site’s root directory, and you will need to use an FTP client to access them. Yoast SEO has a built-in tool that lets you view your .htaccess and robots.txt files. Those files can also be edited directly from your WordPress dashboard. However, we recommend that you use extreme caution when modifying those files.
Yoast SEO Plugin Pricing and Support Options
Yoast SEO is one of those plugins that you may use for free and never pay for the premium version. It is currently implemented on millions of websites throughout the world. The main drawback is that there is no support included with the free plugin. Mostly because it would be impossible to provide free help to hundreds of thousands of users all over the world.
The Yoast SEO plugin comes with a lot of documentation and lessons. Within the admin section, the plugin provides on-screen instructions for each feature. The author’s website additionally describes features and SEO techniques.
Even with free plugin support, you can buy a single site license. It is available only at $69 per year. At the same time, the premium version provides access to all extra features and premium support.
Different Versions of Yoast SEO Plugin
There are mainly two versions of Yoast SEO with their respective benefits. One can upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium if one wants to increase SEO as it has even more great SEO capabilities.
Free plugin-
• Discover how to make use of the Yoast SEO plugin.
• Don’t miss out on SEO features that can save you time and money.
• Get the most out of your website’s settings.
• Yoast SEO Academy and MyYoast provide easy access.
Yoast SEO Premium Plugin-
It is available at $89 per year.
• Gain access to the whole Yoast SEO Academy.
• The Yoast SEO Premium plugin is also included.
• Learn how to do your own SEO.
• Immediately improve your ranks.
The following extensions are available that can perform various functions:
Yoast SEO Premium
If you need to redirect a lot of URLs, the Yoast SEO Premium is worth it. It has a superb redirect manager that, among other things, allows you to import redirects from your .htaccess file, add redirects to your .htaccess file, and specify the type of redirect you want. If you still have questions about using Yoast SEO, you will have access to 13 different video tutorials to help you with this.
Video SEO
Let’s say you have a lot of video content on your website. In that instance, the Video SEO plugin can assist you in providing search engines with the information they require to index your video content and, potentially, provide you with a rich snippet SERP result. While activating the Video SEO plugin does not guarantee that your site will obtain rich snippet results, it can help you get one if Google thinks your content is worthy of them.
SEO News
If you have a news-related website, the SEO News plugin will help you optimize it to appear in Google News results. It won’t submit your site to Google News for you directly, but it will help you optimize it so that you can get there. It lets you make “Standout Tags,” as well as XML News sitemaps and other things.
Local SEO
If being featured in locally targeted search results is important to you, this is the extension you certainly need. The Local SEO extension allows you to supply search engines with critical information about your business, such as your address, phone number, and operation hours so that the search engine can provide users with more accurate and detailed results.
Benefits of Yoast SEO
One of the plugins you will find incredibly handy is the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin. It is a must-have plugin for any WordPress site or blog that optimizes content for search engines. It has many advantages as follows:
User-friendly and accessible tool
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. People can quickly access it, and it works best when used correctly. You can view the results that this tool produces for you as you use it. It can assist you in various ways when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines.
Helps in proofreading
The most important aspect of writing is proofreading. We may misspell any focus keyword in the blog or write incorrect terms. Because of the flaws in the content, it becomes monotonous and uninteresting. This is where Yoast SEO excels, as it performs content proofreading. It aids in the detection of errors in our posts.
Assists you in repairing defects
Yoast SEO assists us in identifying content defects like readability, grammatical errors, passive constructions, long phrases, etc. Yoast advises us to study more about SEO at this point, and here is how you can improve your skills and learn more from Yoast SEO.
Prevents content scraping
Scraping websites use Really Simple Syndication(RSS) feeds to combine content from numerous websites. As a result, search engines may begin to rank the published information higher than the originating website, which in this case is your website. This is why Yoast SEO prevents this by including an RSS feed link to your content.
Suggests focused keywords
Yoast makes recommendations for SEO writing based on the number of keywords in your text. This tool allows you to enter one or more keywords, assessed based on how often they appear in the material.
Disadvantages
Despite the numerous advantages that Yoast Plugin provides, there are some drawbacks to using it. Yoast will only allow you to optimize a particular set of items. It is not possible to fully optimize your site with the Yoast SEO plugin. Let us go through some of its disadvantages:
Misinterprets the intent
When utilizing Yoast SEO, you may run into issues since it does not grasp the intent of your text. If you’ve created your text with several variations on the same keywords but are only being scored on word-for-word matches on your focus keywords, it can be deceiving.
Infuriating
Yoast has a set of rules to follow, but it doesn’t know when and how to break them. Yoast, like those grammar-correcting tools, can fail from time to time. When you see a red or orange light appear in your analysis area, it might be aggravating.
Wastage of time
You might spend a lot of time eliminating a “stop word” that doesn’t even factor into the search engines’ ever-changing algorithms’ ultimate search rankings.
Related article: 10 Most Popular WordPress SEO Plugins
Wrapping Up
An SEO plugin, in our opinion, is a must-have for any website owner. Although there are other popular options, Yoast SEO is one you should not overlook. The plugin aids in the improvement of content SEO by assisting you in finding keywords and advising you on how to optimize your content to rank for those keywords. The plugin also aids in the improvement of material readability by offering criticism that you can simply implement into your writing style. Finally, the Yoast plugin helps your technical SEO by taking care of many technical details in the background, expanding your business, and interacting with even more people. The features listed in this post are simply the tip of the iceberg; download the plugin and begin exploring its vast capabilities.
