Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review

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One of the interesting SEO plugins which I came across recently is a wordpress SEO plugin from a guy well known in the blogging world Joost who is the founder and man behind yoast.com and in fact the detailed guide on wordpress seo which you can find on this blog is an inspiration of detailed guide of the same which you can find on his blog. So I am really happy to review this plugin today which definitely prove to be on-power with most popular similar plugins which you can find for wordpress.

So what so special about this plugin?

Main purpose of creating this product or products similar to this one with same functionality is to combine all the aspects of SEO in to a single powerful plugin which will effectively reduce your job for going in to multiple addons to perform a specific task. The author has done an excellent job by achieving just that, I will go through each of them separately in a more detailed fashion so that we do not miss out anything.

Post and Pages Meta Tags

It becomes really easy to edit your meta tags for each post and page you publish with your wordpress blog, once the installation is complete you will get this additional wordpress seo options area where you can edit your meta titles, meta description. It also displays a snippet preview which you do not find with other plugins, it gives you an idea of how the indexing of particular post will appear in Google and other search engines, which will be extremely useful for you, it also comes with character counts so that you can fill in the amount of information which should be just enough to make your Index stand out.

Other feature I like here is, it comes with a optional box for focus keyword, all you need to do to make use of this functionality is enter the keywords or terms which you want to focus on for the particular article and it will automatically displays a list of places where the keyword is present and also not, this gives you a chance to make some alterations in your post so that your keywords are in place, this is again a unique feature.

As you can see in the picture above there are some advanced options available here, all you need to do is just click over the advanced button and you will come across a whole new set of advanced options, which would be of not much use often but on rare occasions they might just help you to save the day.

Using this options you can either make the particular post or page to be indexed or to be indexed by search engines, add canonical url, even make a 301 redirect which is really cool, so you no need to install a extra plugin to do this job.

Dashboard Settings

Coming down to the dashboard settings, you have a set of options which you can either wish to enable or disable. Also you can easily verify the ownership of your blog on popular online webmaster tools like Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Coming the best part, you have a sitemap generator that is built in to the system I never found such functionality added before on other similar seo addons for wordpress. Just enable the functionality and start creating your own sitemap for your blog with very little effort, but if you still need additional functionality with the same I highly recommend going with separate addons instead of using this one. But this one should just do the job pretty well for most users.

Title Settings

Some people do like to have specific keywords like their site name at the end of all of their titles, if you want to add some similar functionality to your titles then this is just the place where you can make it happen. You can also edit the homepage title and description here. There is also a help section which does come handy for title settings as well as description.

Indexation Settings

Options found here gives you control over the sections which you want to be indexed on your blog as well as sections which you do not want. This really prevents some serious issues with duplicate contents in your site, where same posts appear in multiple locations. I personally love this feature reduces your work with editing your robots.txt or digging in to the codes, all you need to do is just click on the check boxes and you are done.

Permalinks

There are couple of features which I like in this section, like stripping /category/ from category urls, if you have not noticed it before just try opening one of your category on wordpress, url will be displayed as http://yourblog.com/category/category-name

This makes your permalink to appear bit longer, you can strip off the category base from the url so it appears neat and looks good as well, your users will find it useful as well as it makes it easy to remember.

Second feature is redirecting ugly url’s to clean permalinks, not in every occasion you will find people using the correct URLs to your pages, this setting will allow for clean redirection to your pages.

Internal Links

This setting is mainly in connection with breadcrumbs which usually appears at the top of every post letting the users know of the location of a particular post, this is considered as a good practice from SEO point of view. If your theme doesn’t have one already built in, then you can make use of this option to achieve just that, also you can customize your breadcrumbs to the way you want it to appear.

RSS Settings

This a unique feature again letting you to make changes to your RSS feeds, also adds no index to your feeds. Nice feature to use

Import and Export & Edit files

This setting is useful if you want to shift from all in one seo plugin or headspace plugin to this one, also other imports related to Rss footer, yoast breadcrumbs, robots meta. Edit files helps you to alter .htaccess.