Yoast For SEO

A warts-and-all assessment of Yoast for SEO

Yoast has been getting good publicity for its release of version 20.0, especially making its interface design more user friendly.

At best, Yoast is a great SEO tool that can help you optimise your website for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. At worse, it’s a pain to use and doesn’t live up to expectations

In the first section, we’ve put together a shortlist of features and benefits. Then in the second section, we look at the shortcomings.

Yoast can help you to optimise your website for specific keywords. This can help you to get more targeted traffic to your website. The upside is that these keywords can be used throughout the content to help improve your chances of ranking for that term. However, we find that many companies don’t actually know – with certainty – what keywords deliver the best results. They guess.
It can show you ways to improve your website's loading speed. A faster website makes for an improved user experience, which in turn keeps people on your site and pumps up your SEO results.
You can also use the Yoast SEO plugin to generate an XML sitemap. This sitemap will help search engines index your website more effectively and help improve your chances of ranking higher.
As a SEO tool, it can also help you to create RSS feeds for your website. This allows you to syndicate your content more effectively, and that can attract more traffic to your website.
One nifty aspect of Yoast is that it helps you develop your title and meta description tags. Make sure to take advantage of this feature to help your website stand out in the search results. They need to be different for each page.
Yoast can also help you optimise your website's permalinks (links that will stay unchanged for many years). Be sure to use this feature to create short, descriptive URLs that can improve your website's click-through rate.
Take advantage of Yoast's social media features. It can help you add social media share buttons to your website and make the most of your social media.
Finally, Yoast is just a neat overall tool for managing your website's SEO. It has pros and cons but for the DIY SEO enthusiast, it can help you to keep your website's SEO up-to-date and effective. If you aren’t a SEO expert and doing it every day, then this could be the tool for you.

The bottom line? There’s a reason why Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress, with over 5 million active installs.
It can be a great tool for optimising your website for search. It can help you to improve your website's ranking in the SERPs. If you're serious about improving your WordPress website's SEO, then Yoast is definitely worth looking into.

Why Yoast doesn’t live up to the hype
SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, and Yoast is far from perfect. Do your research online and you will find that its critics find if more trouble than it's worth.
Here are some of the biggest complaints:

Yoast is overly complicated. There are so many settings and options to choose from that it's easy to get lost. It is overwhelming for users who are new to SEO and even experienced SEOs can find it difficult to use. This complexity can make it hard to get the results you want, and can even lead to making your website worse off than before you started using it.
Yoast is often inaccurate. The algorithm that Yoast uses to analyse your website is far from perfect, and as a result, it often provides inaccurate information. This can lead to you making changes to your website that don't actually improve your SEO. The caveat here is that many online SEO tools face the same problem. For example, if you get a free trial of five SEO tools and compare their rankings and insights for your site, you will find wide discrepancies. (Yes, we’ve done exactly that for the Boylen site based on keywords such as “SEO Adelaide” and “website design Adelaide”.) We’re biased but we argue that the fickleness of SEO tools this is exactly why serious online businesses need professional HUMAN help.
Yoast can be buggy. Like any software, Yoast is not immune to bugs. These bugs can range from minor annoyances to major problems that can severely impact your website. For example, a recent bug caused Yo
Speed side effect. Another common complaint is that Yoast is a resource hog. Yoast can slow down your website, especially if you have a lot of plugins installed.
Penny pinchers. Finally, many people feel that Yoast is overpriced. The premium version of Yoast costs around $100 per year depending on your currency. For a successful business, that’s pretty cheap but others argue its actually too much when there are free alternatives available.

Overall, critics will argue that Yoast is a popular but flawed SEO tool. In their eyes, it is often inaccurate, difficult to use, and slow and unreliable. These weaknesses can make it hard to get the results that you want from the tool. Its harshest critics actually hate Yoast and think it's a terrible plugin.

Summary
If you're thinking about using Yoast on your WordPress website, it's definitely worth a close look. Sort our the pros and cons into priority order to help reach a decision that fits your specific needs.

Good luck – and let us know if we can help.

SEO Links:

What is SEO?

The business case for investing in SEO

How to set up Google Analytics

What should web design include for good SEO?

Using A/B testing to boost SEO

Quality SEO or quantity? What's best to optimise your website?

Adelaide SEO needs strong security

WordPress SEO

What is on-page SEO?

Schema markup: what is it and why does it matter for search?