There can be few WordPress developers out there who have not heard of Yoast. It is one of the most useful plugins for a WordPress site that I have ever found and, just to make it even more attractive, it is free of charge, at least at the entry level.

What does Yoast Do?

When you write copy for a website you want people to be able to find in on search engines when they search for whatever subject it is that you are writing about. Nowadays that means that the content has to be properly structured and optimised for the keywords or phrases that are relevant to it.

Yoast is a tool to help authors and content writers to optimise their WordPress articles and blog posts around a “focus keyword or phrase” and it gives the finished content a rating ranging from “Needs Improvement” up to “Good”. It does this by comparing the article or post against a checklist of benchmarks including the total word count and how many times the focus keyword is mentioned in the text – this is known as the “keyword density” and Yoast looks for it to be between a minimum of 0.5% and 2.5%.

That’s just one of many checks that Yoast makes of your text. Have you used any H Tags? Have you written an effective Meta Title and Meta Description for your page or post? Search engines look at all these things and, to a greater or lesser extent, they all affect your ranking in the search engine results.

As you may have gathered by now, I’m a massive fan of Yoast. It doesn’t do anything that I couldn’t do for myself but that’s just the point – it makes sure that I do the things I should do when composing a piece of content for a client’s website or one of my own. It’s the nagging piano teacher looking over my shoulder and waiting to tell me when I hit a bum note – or miss one out altogether. I love it.

Yoast is, as I have said, available as a free of charge WordPress plugin so you don’t have to think long and hard about it. Get it today and see how much more efficient and effective it makes you. There is a “Pro” version which gives you more superpowers like the ability to optimise a page for more than one focus keyword. That won’t matter to everyone but it’s great value for $79 per year.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in raising your glasses and drinking a toast – to Yoast!