Yoast SEO free | Features of the free plugin explained
Hi, I'm Marieke van de Rakt
and I'm the CEO of Yoast. I'm very excited to tell you all about our free Yoast SEO
for WordPress plugin! Maybe you're wondering
why we offer a free plugin in the first place. Well, that's because our mission
is "SEO for everyone". It doesn't matter if you're
a large company or a small website. We think that everyone
should get the opportunity to rank in the search engines. And that's why we offer
two versions of our Yoast SEO plugin: a paid version – which we call Premium –
and a free one. Both versions work
in the classic WordPress editor and in the block editor.
However, if you're using the block editor,
we'll give you some bonus features: our plugin will add some extra blocks
to your blocks library! I'll tell you more about them later. OK, let's get started! I will talk you through a lot of features, but I'll do my best
to keep things short and fast. We have other videos
that go into the details, so don't worry.
So, you're writing all kinds of texts
for your site. Great! Now, our plugin helps you
bring your text to the next level. It comes with two extensive analyses. The SEO analysis helps you optimize
your text for SEO. And the Readability analysis helps you
make your text easier to read. Let's focus on the SEO analysis first. How does it work? Well, you first need
to fill in your focus keyphrase, so the term you want your text
to rank for in the search engines. We always advise you to do
some keyword research before you start writing. You need to know
what people are searching for, because otherwise, you can't give them
the answers and solutions they need. And that makes it
much more difficult to rank. However, keyword research
can be quite hard. To make things a bit easier for you, we've built a super cool feature
in partnership with SEMrush, one of the biggest
SEO tool providers out there. This feature lets you quickly find keyphrases
that are related to your focus keyphrase.
And you get access
to a bunch of useful metrics as well, such as volume
and trends for a specific keyphrase! If you upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium,
you can even take things a step further. While Yoast SEO Free helps you optimize
for only one focus keyphrase; Yoast SEO Premium helps you optimize for related keyphrases
and synonyms as well. Let's get back to the analysis. After you've entered your focus keyphrase,
we run several checks on your content. A lot of them have to do
with your keyphrase: did you use it in your title,
your introduction, your headings? Did you use it often enough
or maybe too often? We give you feedback
about all these things. Green, orange, and red bullets
indicate what you did well and what needs improvement.
The feedback that comes with the bullets tells you exactly
how you can improve your text. In addition to keyphrase checks,
the SEO analysis also gives you feedback about your links, images
and snippet elements. In other words: we tell you exactly
how you can improve your content from the perspective of SEO. Our other analysis,
the readability analysis, gives feedback from a different perspective. But why should you care about readability? Well, I'll tell you why:
because it's important for your visitors.
Reading from a screen is hard
and people get distracted quickly. But, more importantly, you want people
to understand what you're writing. You want to get your message across. Nobody likes to read something
that's incomprehensible, boring, or stuffed with keywords. If you write a text
that people don't understand, you won't help people to find what they need. And in the end,
that's bad for your SEO as well. So, that's why we help you write
clear and easy to read texts. The readability analysis
runs a lot of checks, and we base them on extensive research. For example, our feedback system
will warn you if your text contains
too many long sentences or paragraphs. Or, it will advise you
to use more headings or transition words. Just to name a few things. In addition to these big analysis tools,
our plugin has so many more cool features! Where shall I start?
Oh, I know: the Google preview. This tool helps you see
through the eyes of Google. Because your work isn't over
when you've finished writing a post. You also want it to look nice
and stand out in the search results.
After all, you want people
to click your result and visit your site. In the Google preview, you can check how your result
might look like in the search results. You can toggle
between desktop and mobile. And you can also edit
the elements of your snippet: the SEO title, the slug,
and the meta description. If you don't know how to go about this, just take a look at the feedback
we provide in the SEO analysis. In addition to the Google preview, we also have a Facebook preview
and a Twitter preview. Right here, you can decide what image,
title, and description people see when someone shares your post
on Facebook and Twitter. This makes your social media optimization
a lot quicker and easier, as you won't have to leave your post
to make these changes.
If you use Yoast SEO Premium,
you will also be able to preview the post, so you'll know exactly
what it will look like. OK, now let's talk about breadcrumbs, those clickable links that are usually visible
at the top of a page or post. They are really, really helpful to visitors,
as they make it easy to navigate your site. However, breadcrumbs can get messy. Imagine you have a post
that belongs to multiple categories. How can you control which category
appears in the breadcrumbs? The answer is: with Yoast SEO! The plugin allows you
to set a primary category for each post. And as a result, you can control which category
appears in the breadcrumbs path. Smart, right? Wow, time flies when you're having fun! We've already discussed
quite a lot of features. But did you know that Yoast SEO
also does a ton of stuff in the background to make sure that search engines
can find your content? One of the most significant innovations
at Yoast that we are super proud of is our Schema implementation.
When you use Yoast SEO, we automatically add
structured data code to your pages. Are you wondering
what that means for you? Well, this code helps search engines
better understand the page. And if they can understand
your content better, they will be able to display
your content better too. We all want to have
these eye-catching rich results. Well, Yoast SEO definitely increases
your chances to get them. If you are using the block editor, you can even use
our special structured data blocks.
So, what's next? Sitemaps! Yoast SEO creates an XML sitemap
for your website automatically. A good XML sitemap acts
as a roadmap of your website that leads Google
to all your important pages. Crawlers really like these things, because they make your content
easier to find. Yes, I know, WordPress now also comes
with a built-in XML sitemap, which is great! But, while the WordPress sitemap
is very basic, XML sitemaps in Yoast SEO are richer,
better, and more powerful. The last technical feature
I definitely want to mention is that Yoast SEO enables you
to set a canonical URL. Wow, Marieke, that sounds difficult. What do you mean? Well, let me explain this with an example. Let's say, you are selling products
in different colors and sizes. You have a different URL
for each product variation, but the product descriptions
are the same on every page. This could really confuse search engines:
they don't know which page to rank. Yoast SEO helps you solve this by letting you
indicate one URL as the original one – we call this the canonical URL.
No more duplicate content issues!
No more confusing Google! Last but not least, I want to emphasize
something that I'm really proud of. In the beginning, I said that our mission
is "SEO for everyone". And that is not just a marketing phrase. We work hard to enable people
all over the world to use our SEO tool in their language. Currently, Yoast SEO can do
a keyphrase analysis for most languages. However, some checks
are language-specific, and they behave differently
for different languages. That is why we work hard to keep
the list of languages we support growing! So, make sure to keep
an eye on our releases! OK, that was a lot to process. So, let's do a quick recap. Yoast SEO helps you write
the best content for your readers. Of course, it also helps you
tick all the SEO boxes you need to rank in search engines. The plugin does a lot of things
in the background.
For example, it adds
structured data to your site. And as a result, your site might be presented
better in the search results. Now, despite all these fantastic features,
our plugin can't do all the work for you. It can't write awesome content,
for example. You have to do that yourself. What it can do – however – is make it as easy as possible
to work on your site's SEO. And our Premium plugin
makes it even easier! :).
