what is a yoast seo plugin

What Yoast SEO does

Yoast SEO offers you loads of tools and features to boost your SEO. Some of these features influence the SEO of your whole site; other features help you to optimize individual posts and pages for search engines. At Yoast we really believe in our motto “SEO for everyone”, so you can access all the most essential SEO tools in our free Yoast SEO plugin. But if you really want to give your SEO a boost, upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium — it’s got even more amazing SEO features!

SEO for your posts and pages

If you want your posts and pages to appear in the search results, you need to optimize them! So, when you use WordPress to create/edit posts, you’ll find a whole load of Yoast SEO tools to help you draft and optimize great content. And if you think SEO optimization is all about keywords, think again. The tools and tips in our Yoast SEO plugins put equal focus on quality content and user experience, too. Trust us — it will all help your rankings, whether directly or indirectly.

Here’s how the plugins will help you optimize your posts and pages:

Make sure you’re optimizing correctly (we’ll tell you if you aren’t)

After you’ve done your keyword research (you can use our integrated Semrush keyword data for that), you’ll have to start optimizing the pages and posts on your sites for the keywords and keyphrases you want to rank for. To do that, you can set a focus keyphrase for an article in Yoast SEO. Then, the plugin uses our content SEO analyses to determine how your content scores on different ranking factors. It checks things like how many times you use your keyphrase, the length of your text, or whether you used any internal links.

The results of these analyses guide you to optimize your post or page to rank with your chosen keyphrase. You’ll see red, orange and green bullets to indicate how every factor scores. This gives you an easy overview of the overall score and what you can still tackle to increase your rankings!

The content SEO analysis tells you how to optimize your text for a certain keyword with the use of red, orange, and green bullets.

Get guidance for writing high quality, readable content — in 19 languages!

Optimizing your content to rank with the right keyphrase is important, but don’t forget your reader! Even if you write amazing content for search engines, your audience won’t benefit from it if they don’t understand it. When a person doesn’t understand your content, the chance of them buying something from you is close to zero. The same is true for the odds of them sharing one of your articles with their friends. So, you need to make sure your content is also easy to understand. And that’s where the readability features come in.

Our readability checks let you adopt the feedback in a way that suits you, without losing your personal touch. If you’re interested in all the factors that increase readability, you can read more about the Yoast SEO readability features.

The readability analysis tells you how to optimize your text to make it easy to read with the use of red, orange, and green bullets. This is a screenshot of our Premium plugin.

The full set* of readability checks are available for English, German, Dutch, Farsi, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Norwegian, and Slovak. Selected readability features are available for even more languages; check out the full overview of languages per feature if you want to know more!

* Unfortunately, it’s not possible to calculate the Flesch reading ease score for some of these languages. Check the overview below to see which languages.

Yoast SEO’s readability features are well-researched analyses that give you feedback on how to optimize your writing. Now, this may sound strange, because the way you write can be very personal. Let us explain how it works. The plugin uses an algorithm to check your content on different factors that are proven to increase readability. We look at the use of transition words, the use of passive voice, your sentence and paragraph lengths and more. But we carefully crafted this algorithm to make it as accurate as possible without being too strict.

Influence what Google shows in search results

Of course, you don’t just want your pages to show up in Google’s search results. You want your search results to look amazing, too! That’s why Yoast SEO comes with a set of tools to let you plan and preview how each page will (probably) look when it appears on Google. Probably is something we can’t really avoid here — Google will occasionally decide it knows better, and show something else instead. But by optimizing certain outputs on your page, you can indicate how Google should present your content to users. And that’s definitely still something worth doing.

With our plugin, you’ll be able to specify an SEO title (the ‘headline’ of your search result) and a meta description (a short piece of text underneath your search headline, describing what users can find on your page) for each new page you publish. We’ll let you know if these are too long, or if your keyword is missing. If you want to, you can also set defaults for all of your pages.

You might have seen search results that contain extra parts before, beyond the usual headline-and-description format. The example below contains recipes with extra information like reviews, cooking time, ingredients and images, for instance. And that’s just one example. There are possibilities to add extra information for all kinds of results, including products!

The way to get results like this is by using Schema structured data. We won’t lie: it’s complex, technical stuff. Luckily for you, you won’t need to know a thing about the tech wizardry behind it. Just having Yoast SEO installed means you’ll automatically have structured data output for your pages. All you need to do is select a few options to make sure it suits your needs.

Now, social media isn’t strictly a part of SEO. But when you make great content, you often want to share that content on your social feeds, too. That’s why Yoast SEO also comes with Facebook and Twitter previews that you can adjust to make sure your content is always looking great, whoever is sharing it. You can set a specific title, description and OpenGraph image for each post. Again, if you prefer to set one standard structure for all posts, there’s an option to do that.