Search Engine Optimisation is a term that people are becoming increasingly familiar with because anyone who has a website needs to understand it. Rather than it being a phrase that only experienced marketers have knowledge in, people from outside that circle are taking the time to get familiar with the key principles.
It is no coincidence that more people are starting to set up and maintain websites by themselves rather than going through a web developer. With so many websites now offering free web hosting options, more people have ventured into creating a website without having previous experience in the area. Even shared web hosting has become extremally affordable for most business owners. The guys at top10-websitehosting.co.uk have put together a list of the cheapest options.Because people are more likely to work on a website themselves, they take a deeper interest in how everything works and what drives success. And it is here that SEO plays a very significant role.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with how SEO works, in very basic terms, search engines such as Google or Bing use a system that analyses websites and web pages and rates them. Google uses an algorithm to determine how high or low a page ranks when a search term is typed into the search field. There are a large number of factors that impact the ranking and these are not freely available to view but experts come up with their own interpretation of how to achieve higher rankings. So for example, a common principle is that content should contain keywords so that the search engine can link the content when those keywords are used in the search field.
Older, more established websites are deemed to be regarded as better by Google and the more visitors a site has, the more important it is thought to be. The algorithms that are used are often updated and sometimes a small tweak can have a huge impact on a website’s search engine ranking. Now if this is starting to sound a bit overcomplicated to you that is okay because the SEO Yoast Plugin is here to help non SEO experts achieve better rankings.
Yoast SEO can be installed from the Plugin directory in the same way that any plugin is installed. There is a premium version and a free version, so depending on your budget you can select the one more suitable for your needs. The premium package starts at around $69 per year for one website. If this means that you appear higher in the rankings and therefore get more business, this could turn out to be money that is very well spent.
Once you have installed the Yoast plugin, you will be able to either go into the Yoast dashboard using the navigation bar or you can go onto each page of the website to see if there are any SEO flags. For example, it will indicate whether it needs to be improved in terms of readability or whether a keyword has been set up. There is a SEO analysis area where advice is provided that can help to optimise the content.
Typical advice includes whether the content has enough words, whether a meta description has been specified, whether there are any images or links. Adding relevant links will help the search engine to associate your content to related websites. The premium version even provides suggestions for links to internal pages within your website. Another great feature of premium Yoast is the redirect manager, where old URLs get directed to new ones rather than displaying a 404 Not Found page that often causes your visitors to leave your website. For non SEO experts, SEO Yoast is a great plugin to get you started and get your website higher up the rankings.
