Adding the Yoast plugin to your WordPress site gives you the opportunity to optimize your SEO tactics. Yoast assists you with your webpage titles and meta descriptions.
Think of your website’s page titles and meta descriptions like a book. The book title, displayed on the front cover and spine of the book, tells what the book is about, much like the page title of your website’s webpages. The blurb on the back of the book jacket gives a brief overview of what happens in the book. On a webpage, this blurb would be your meta description.
Yoast makes it easy to write page titles and meta descriptions for your page. Firs you’ll need a focus keyword – you can also think of this as the topic or subject of your page. Today, we’re selling espadrilles, so espadrille will be the focus keyword.
How To Write The Page Title
There are a variety of ways to write a page title. A page title should contain these elements: your focus keyword, a location, your business name and your page name.
Google likes page titles to fall under 70 characters, any more and it won’t be displayed properly, so try to get your page title to fit in that amount of space. Yoast will give a preview screen to show what it will look like.
How To Write A Meta Description
This is where you write your jacket blurb. The max amount of characters for the meta description is 156, so around the same amount of space you’d have for a Tweet. In the meta description, you want to describe what will be on the page that a user will navigate to and, this might be hard in such a small space, but try to make it enticing. Make sure to include your focus keyword in the description.
Check the focus keyword usage, found below the “focus keyword” field to see how well you did incorporating your focus keyword. For each new page and blog post of your website, you’ll need to write a unique entry for each of these elements.
Do you use Yoast to optimize the SEO for your website? What do you think? Tell us in the comments!