SEO scoring for Blogs – Yoast

If content is king, then conversion is queen

-Jon Munsell

Yoast is a plugin for WordPress websites, designed to optimise the ranking of any pages or posts (other SEO optimisation tools are available – it’s just that this one is embedded in my website and is easy to use).

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a game which you have to play, and as in all games there are rules.

These rules might be a little bit clunky and unwieldy for my liking, but the more you ‘use them’, the more you learn how to adapt your content when writing for SEO optimisation……which does make life easier in the long-term.

Yoast SEO rules (in a nutshell):

• Have a topic in mind – front-end load the keyword
• Think beyond the copy – have the keyword tagged in images & in the meta description
• Don’t be too grammatically correct in titles – avoid stop words and remember keywords
• Avoid using too many long words – Flesch readability scores give some indication

The top 6 SEO rules according to Yoast

There are lots of SEO rules – believe me!

The usage of headings, sub-headings, keyword density…etc goes on and on, but remember – you only have to get the basics right, not every single point, and that should be enough to rank you above anybody who doesn’t bother with to SEO their blogs at all.

1.Focus Keyword

“Positioning – the keyword should appear in the URL, at the beginning of the page title, in at least one of the sub-headings, and somewhere in the 1st paragraph”

Density – however, having said all that about ‘Positioning’ the keyword shouldn’t be over-used! This is measured by density – the number of times the keyword is used v total number of words – with 2.5% considered the maximum (don’t ask me why it’s 2.5%)

Uniqueness – ideally, you should use a different keyword for each blog posting.

2. Number of words

Page Title – this should be between 40 characters (minimum) 70 characters (maximum)

Text – this should be between 300 words (minimum) and something more (not sure what maximum is, but common-sense dictates there’s no point writing a 10,000 word blog….is there?)

2.Images

“The images on this page do not have alt tags containing your focus keyword”

Your image should have a box next to it, with Title, Caption, ALT…etc – copy in your keyword into the ALT box.

3.Readability

“The Flesch Readability Score uses the sentence length (number of words per sentence) and the number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease – a score of 60-70 (out of 100) is considered acceptable/ normal for web text”

Texts with a score of 100 are very easy to read, have short sentences and no words of more than two syllables, whilst those which rank 30 or below are considered complex with long sentences and complicated words.

4.URL

“The slug* for this page contains one or more stop words, consider removing them.”

In other words, “the, is, at, which, want, on…etc” 

There are lots of stop words – click here for a full list

* Note: A URL slug is the exact address of a specific page or post on your site; e.g. www.nobleword.co.uk/social media seo scoring for blogs

5.Related topics

“No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate”

Search engines love hyperlinks to external sites, or to other internal posts

6. Meta description 

“The meta description should contain the focus keyword”

This is the snippet/twitter type headline which appears in Google Search below the URL (or any other search engine for that matter) when you type in a query to a search engine and receive back pages of results.

In the specified meta description, consider:

• How does it compare to the competition?
• Could it be made more appealing?
  

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