I’m very excited to tell you all about Yoast SEO free features for WordPress plugin. It doesn’t matter if you’re a large company or a small website. We think that everyone should get the opportunity to rank in the search engines.
Yoast SEO Features – free and premium
And that’s why there are two versions of our Yoast SEO plugin. A paid version – which we call Premium – and a free one. Both versions work in the classic WordPress editor and in the block editor. However, if you’re using the block editor, we’ll give you some bonus features: plugin will add some extra blocks to your blocks library! I’ll tell you more about them later.
OK, let’s get started! I will talk you through a lot of features, but I’ll do my best to keep things short and fast. So, you’re writing all kinds of texts for your site. Great! Now, this plugin helps you bring your text to the next level.
Analyses
It comes with two extensive analyses. The SEO analysis helps you optimize your text for SEO. And the Readability analysis helps you make your text easier to read.
Let’s focus on the SEO analysis first. How does it work? Well, you first need to fill in your focus keyphrase, so the term you want your text to rank for in the search engines. We always advise you to do some keyword research before you start writing. You need to know what people are searching for, because otherwise, you can’t give them the answers and solutions they need.
And that makes it much more difficult to rank. However, keyword research can be quite hard. To make things a bit easier for you, yoast seo built a super cool feature in partnership with SEMrush, one of the biggest SEO tool providers out there.
This feature lets you quickly find keyphrases that are related to your focus keyphrase. And you get access to a bunch of useful metrics as well, such as volume and trends for a specific keyphrase.
If you upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium, you can even take things a step further. While Yoast SEO Free helps you optimize for only one focus keyphrase; Yoast SEO Premium helps you optimize for related keyphrases and synonyms as well.
SEO Analysis – free features
Let’s get back to the analysis. After you’ve entered your focus keyphrase, we run several checks on your content. A lot of them have to do with your keyphrase: did you use it in your title, your introduction, your headings? Did you use it often enough or maybe too often?.
Yoast seo give you feedback about all these things. Green, orange, and red bullets indicate what you did well and what needs improvement. The feedback that comes with the bullets tells you exactly how you can improve your text.
In addition to keyphrase checks, the SEO analysis also gives you feedback about your links, images and snippet elements. In other words: we tell you exactly how you can improve your content from the perspective of SEO.
Readability Analysis – Yoast SEO free features
Our other analysis, the readability analysis, gives feedback from a different perspective. But why should you care about readability? Well, I’ll tell you why: because it’s important for your visitors. Reading from a screen is hard and people get distracted quickly.
But, more importantly, you want people to understand what you’re writing. You want to get your message across. Nobody likes to read something that’s incomprehensible, boring, or stuffed with keywords.
If you write a text that people don’t understand, you won’t help people to find what they need. And in the end, that’s bad for your SEO as well. So, that’s why we help you write clear and easy to read texts.
The readability analysis runs a lot of checks, and we base them on extensive research. For example, our feedback system will warn you if your text contains too many long sentences or paragraphs. Or, it will advise you to use more headings or transition words.
Posts Previews
Just to name a few things. In addition to these big analysis tools, our plugin has so many more cool features! Where shall I start? Oh, I know: the Google preview. This tool helps you see through the eyes of Google.
Because your work isn’t over when you’ve finished writing a post. You also want it to look nice and stand out in the search results. After all, you want people to click your result and visit your site.
In the Google preview, you can check how your result might look like in the search results. You can toggle between desktop and mobile. And you can also edit the elements of your snippet: the SEO title, the slug, and the meta description.
If you don’t know how to go about this, just take a look at the feedback we provide in the SEO analysis. In addition to the Google preview, we also have a Facebook preview and a Twitter preview. Right here, you can decide what image, title, and description.
People see when someone shares your post on Facebook and Twitter. This makes your social media optimization a lot quicker and easier, as you won’t have to leave your post to make these changes.
If you use Yoast SEO Premium, you will also be able to preview the post, so you’ll know exactly what it will look like.
Breadcrumbs – Yoast SEO free features
OK, now let’s talk about breadcrumbs, those clickable links that are usually visible at the top of a page or post. They are really, really helpful to visitors, as they make it easy to navigate your site. However, breadcrumbs can get messy. Imagine you have a post that belongs to multiple categories. How can you control which category appears in the breadcrumbs? The answer is: with Yoast SEO!
The plugin allows you to set a primary category for each post. And as a result, you can control which category appears in the breadcrumbs path. Smart, right?
Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! We’ve already discussed quite a lot of features. But did you know that Yoast SEO also does a ton of stuff in the background to make sure that search engines can find your content? One of the most significant innovations at Yoast that we are super proud of is our Schema implementation. When you use Yoast SEO, we automatically add structured data code to your pages.
Are you wondering what that means for you? Well, this code helps search engines better understand the page. And if they can understand your content better, they will be able to display your content better too. We all want to have these eye-catching rich results.
XML Sitemaps
Well, Yoast SEO definitely increases your chances to get them. If you are using the block editor, you can even use our special structured data blocks. So, what’s next? Sitemaps! Yoast SEO creates an XML sitemap for your website automatically. A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website that leads Google to all your important pages. Crawlers really like these things, because they make your content easier to find.
Yes, I know, WordPress now also comes with a built-in XML sitemap, which is great! But, while the WordPress sitemap is very basic, XML sitemaps in Yoast SEO are richer, better, and more powerful.
Canonical URL
The last technical feature I definitely want to mention is that Yoast SEO enables you to set a canonical URL. What do you mean? Well, let me explain this with an example. Let’s say, you are selling products in different colors and sizes.
You have a different URL for each product variation, but the product descriptions are the same on every page. This could really confuse search engines: they don’t know which page to rank. Yoast SEO helps you solve this by letting you indicate one URL as the original one – we call this the canonical URL. No more duplicate content issues! No more confusing Google!
Languages
Yoast seo work hard to enable people all over the world to use our SEO tool in their language. Currently, Yoast SEO can do a keyphrase analysis for most languages. However, some checks are language-specific, and they behave differently for different languages.
If you want to learn more please visit our blog page.