A closer look at one of our favorite SEO Tools.

At Roundpeg, we do all our web designs with WordPress. Aside from the many reasons why we choose to design in WordPress and all the awesome plugins you can get (both paid and free), the biggest reason I love WordPress is my good buddy Yoast SEO.

For those of you who are not familiar, the Yoast SEO is a free plugin for WordPress and one of the greatest gifts ever given to web designers and digital marketers. Yoast SEO makes planning and improving SEO scores for both posts and landing pages crazy easy!

If you are serious about improving your website’s search engine ranking and have spent countless nights laying awake in bed tortured by the ruthless world of SEO (who hasn’t), Yoast SEO is the answer.

I like to think of Yoast as the Mr. Rogers of SEO: nice, accommodating, helpful, and always ready to help you learn. Don’t believe me? Here are a few of the reasons why Yoast SEO simplifies your SEO.

Super easy keyword optimization and scoring

Finding the right keyword for each of your pages is a delicate process. While Yoast SEO can’t tell you the exact word that best fits the page and content, it can give you great direction. Yoast SEO helps you determine the best keyword by actually giving you a score every time you input a keyword. It looks a little something like this:

Based on the content on the page and the keyword you’ve chosen, Yoast SEO will let you know if you are on the right track. This tool proceeds to score the entire page on a color-coded basis. Green means good, orange means OK and red means bad. If Yoast SEO gives you the green light you know you’ve provided strong content and accompanied it with a smart keyword. If you get orange or red you know you can improve, using the provided analysis to narrow your focus.

The paid version of Yoast SEO is one of the few SEO tools out there that lets you use multiple keywords on each page as well.

Know exactly how people will see your post

How does my page title look? Is it too long? Does the page url (slug) make sense? Yoast SEO answers the important questions you need to think about when it comes to page SEO.

This tool lets you preview how your page will appear in a Google search and lets you customize the page title, slug, and meta description. Yoast SEO even lets you know when your page title and description get too long-winded. The paid version allows you to do the same kind of preview with social media.

Yoast SEO also lets you set up templates for it to use if you forget to fill in this section. I told you Yoast SEO was a nice guy!

Yoast SEO Tools improve your writing

In the same way that Yoast SEO monitors and scores your keywords, it also checks your writing. Google responds more positively to pages that follow certain content criteria such as length, readability, and sentence structure. Yoast SEO knows this and, being the bro that it is, lets you know if your content is solid.

Combining each element of evaluation, you will also receive an overall readability score from Yoast SEO so you can continue to fine tune until it is ready for the web.

These are only a few of the many features of Yoast SEO that lead me to the conclusion that Yoast SEO stands out as one of the most useful tools for anyone serious about better SEO.

Seriously, unlike some SEO tools out there, any old Joe Schmoe can learn how to effectively utilize Yoast SEO. In fact, the Roundpeg team can train you in an hour!