In my previous blog posts, I talked about SEO basics, picking a proper keyword and content creation and creating headings and adding images.  In this post, I’ll share an amazing WordPress Plugin to help you with search engine optimization.

The plugin is called Yoast SEO, and it’s free.  With this plugin, on any page you create, you can enter in your keyword for the page.  Then the plugin will evaluate all aspects of that page, and let you know how well the page will rank, with a traffic light system.  Red = bad, yellow = ok and green = good.

The plugin will compare your keyword to your content, and check that you’re using the keyword in your content, and tell you how many times you’ve used it.  It will also check the title and URL of your page.

Lastly the plugin will let you edit the Meta Description and Meta Title for the page.   The Meta Title on a page, is a title that’s not visibly seen by the user – they will see the title of the WordPress page or post, but rather it’s the title that would be shown when you see your site listed in a search engine (or linked on Facebook).  Likewise the Meta Description is a brief description which would be shown on a search engine listing (or linked on Facebook).  This plugin will check that you’ve included your keyword in each of these as well.

This plugin is invaluable, as WordPress inherently doesn’t allow you to modify your Meta Title or Meta Description on a page (or post) by page basis.

This tool is only for guidance, in the real world you’ll never turn every page green, but if you use it, it will encourage you to work your keyword into the areas you should and give you some idea of how well of a job you’ve done.

SEO experts are few and far between, because the landscape is forever changing, and it’s a very complex subject for just a few blog posts.  But if you follow these few simple tips, you’ll begin making headway in the world of SEO!

>> Joshua Pettit is Lead Developer and Project Manager at Sunrise Marketing.  http://www.sunrise-marketing.com/