Creating a website is just the first step in building your online business. In order to make your website work for you, you’re going to want to work on its SEO. Thankfully, there is an easy way to optimize your WordPress SEO with the Yoast SEO plugin, and its completely free!

Uhm, what even is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s basically a combination of how easily your site is read by search engines like google, and how ‘relevant’ it is. Ease of use by search engines is a result of things like properly using headings adn body paragraphs, incorporating the right keywords and titling your images. Relevance is determined by things like links that point to your site on other websites, links in your site that link out to other websites, and visitor behavior.

That’s starting to make sense, but how do we optimize WordPress SEO?

There are SEO experts you can pay to help optimize your website. Working with a great copywriter can also help. (We have some reco’s here). But, if you’re looking to DIY it and you have a WordPress website, you’re in luck.

Yoast SEO is the easiest way to optimize your blog posts and pages

Once you install the Yoast SEO plugin (see video above), you will get a panel like the picture below at the bottom of every page and blog post on your website. Don’t worry – this appears in the ‘Edit’ window – not on the live site!

This panel allows you to input your keyword or ‘focus keyphrase’ – this is the phrase that you want this blog post or page to rank for – ideally the thing you think people will be searching for to get to the product, service or information your provide.

Once you add your focus keyphrase, Yoast SEO will tell you what you need to improve to optimize your page or post.

optimize WordPress SEO

As you can see, the green things are items that your post does well, the yellow things are suggested improvements, and the red things are items you should really work on. If you work on enough of the yellow and red things, your post will get the Yoast SEO green light – oila! You’re optimized.

Best of luck! Xx, Kara

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