Throughout our blog, we offer many tips and practical strategies that you can use to optimize your website, and today we have another one. We’re going to show you how to use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize a new website, which is a useful tactic but one – that like the other tactics we’ve shared – should be put into practice as part of a holistic SEO approach. SEO, as you hopefully have begun to realize, is not simply a matter of using certain keyword in blog posts. It’s integrating those keywords into web content, blog posts, title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags – and it’s creating an SEO framework in which optimization using keywords is part of a smartly planned and wide-reaching overall SEO strategy.

Regarding keywords, the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress can help you determine if you’re using your focus keyword optimally in your SEO strategy for each page of your site and it can point you in the right direction toward actions you can take to get your site ranked well in Google Search. But, it can also lead you astray, which is why you need to make sure you’ve read all of our other tips for optimizing your website. Getting that coveted green light from Yoast can indicate that you’ve done a great job in optimizing a page on your website, but trying to obtain that green SEO light of approval should not detour you from using optimization strategies you know are working but Yoast says are not.

Using the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your new website takes considerable thought and potentially many steps, but we’ll guide you through some of the easiest ones here.

Start with Valuable Content using Yoast SEO Plugin

Any attempt to optimize your site with Yoast must begin with you having content on your site that’s valuable to your reader, and that makes sense given your industry. If you don’t start with solid and useable content, your chosen focus keyword that Yoast wants you to have may be awkward to read within your content and it may turn off users, even if Yoast says it’s okay. In addition, trying to hard to optimize for keywords and not focusing on relatable and useable content could mean your alt tags, meta descriptions, and title tags that incorporate your focus keyword will be confusing to someone searching for a specific topic.

Choose Your Focus Keywords

The Yoast SEO plugin for Word Press will ask you for a focus keyword, so you should research keywords before optimizing for Yoast. For each page of your website that you optimize (you should be optimizing all of them), you’ll want to choose a focus keyword that makes sense with regard to the page’s content and that shows high search volume when you do your keyword analysis. Every page of your site should use a different pertinent and well-ranking focus keyword.

Use Your Focus Keywords in Your Content

You’ll help Yoast help you, and give you that green SEO light, if you insert your focus keyword in your heading, first paragraph of content, subheading, middle of content, and last paragraph. Keep in mind that you should break up your content with several subheadings to make it easier for your users to read. And, don’t go overboard with focus keywords in every subheading; placing them in 1 or 2 is fine.

Write a Unique Meta Description

Yoast will reward you if you write a unique meta description for each page of your site and include your focus keyword in that meta description. If you haven’t noticed in WordPress yet, when you create content, a meta description is created for you. This meta description is not optimized for SEO or maximum click through’s from SERPs. Take advantage of Yoast’s suggestion to come up with a unique meta description to better optimize your site. And, use your unique meta description to give users a quick look on the SERPs as to what your page is about. Your meta description and your title tags are some of the most prominent pieces of information about you on search engine results pages.

Create Your Title Tags

Yoast wants you to create custom title tags for each web page and it wants you to include your focus keyword in those title tags. When you write your title tags and insert them into the Yoast SEO plugin, see if you can also fit your company name in the title tags and, third in importance, insert another high-ranking keyword.

Add Images

Yoast will guide you to add a feature image to your site. It will suggest that you add alt tags to your feature image, and to any other images on the page, that contain your focus keyword. Do what Yoast suggests and add focus keyword-rich alt tags to every image on your site.

Need Help With How to Use Yoast SEO Plugin to Optimize a New Website?

As we mentioned, there are several steps you’ll need to take to optimize your site for Yoast. After logging into WordPress, you’ll find the Yoast SEO plugin in the left navigation, under Products. You’ll click “edit” to expand the editor so that you can make your content changes to optimize according to Yoast. If you need help with your Yoast SEO optimization, Galileo Tech Media can help. We work with in-house agencies and brands large and small to optimize for Yoast and to create comprehensive SEO marketing strategies.