In this on page SEO check in-depth tutorial, I will show you how to use the SEO by Yoast plugin to optimize your WordPress blog article for on page optimization.
If you can successfully carry out your article’s on page SEO check using the attributes I will be sharing in this tutorial, it will raise your blog’s on page SEO score and it will give your blog articles a huge chance to rank on search engine result pages.
We are going to use a free SEO tool to carry out this process. You will see how easy it is to carry out your on page SEO checklist with this WordPress tool.
You will be blown away by how easy you can quickly fix your blog post SEO issues, especially if you consider yourself not to be an SEO expert.
Recommended: Best SEO Plugins For WordPress To Consider In 2022
SEO by Yoast plugin
I will show you how to use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your blog article’s on page SEO score, specifically for readability and SEO rating.
I will assume that you already did your keyword research right and your blog post is well set up and well written.
Install Yoast SEO Plugin
The first thing is to be sure you have the Yoast plugin installed.
If you haven’t already, then follow the simple process below to install your Yoast SEO plugin
1. Login to your WordPress admin dashboard
2. Navigate to the Plugin tab. Hover your mouse on the Plugin tab
3. Click the Add New tab
3 Search for Yoast in the plugin search bar
4 Install and then activate.
Now, the Yoast plugin is active on your website.
5 Come down to the left main below and click the Yoast tab so we check up on the basic setup.
6 Go to Features on the options tab and be sure that the first 4 options are active.
You should leave every option at the default setting and since we will not be doing other things like setting up Google Search Console, we will leave every other setting the way they are.
Write a blog post
To write a blog post go to the post tab
Click add new.
Compose your article
On page SEO attributes Using the Yoast SEO plugin
Once you are done with your writing, scroll to the base of your article and locate the Yoast SEO feature.
As you can see here, we have 4 different attributes that we must optimize all our blog posts for; SEO, Readability, Schema, and Social.
We will be focusing our attention on the SEO and Readability attributes.
Yoast SEO plugin has fashioned an interesting way to rate your on page SEO check using color indicators.
For each SEO attribute to check, there are 3 colors that show your score; Red for poor, amber for fair, and green for excellent.
Ideally, you always want to optimize all your SEO attributes to become green. This is usually very easy as the Yoast plugin has made these fixes so easy to do.
We will see how easy it is as we fix them below.
Let’s begin our optimization from the Readability attribute.
You should also see this: 8 Steps To Raise Your Blog’s SEO Score Explained
Readability
What does Readability optimization does for a blog post?
it helps to check your content, making sure it is easy to read by your blog visitors.
Also, search engines love well-structured and well-written content, so it’s more like killing 2 birds with one stone.
Ideally, your Readability attribute must change from red to amber and then to green before you should be satisfied with your Readability score. This also applies to your SEO score.
Most times, your Readerbility score will be red once you are through with your article, particularly if you are an inexperienced writer.
Our task here is to work on our Readability score until our color indicator turns green
1. Click Readability
There are 7 Readability features that we have to optimize before we can achieve the green color change.
Sometimes, some of these features would have been auto-optimized, especially if you’ve written and structured your blog posts well.
But you will always have quite a number of them that shows red or amber and for those, you will have to edit your blog article till it turns green.
Consecutive sentences
Sometimes as writers, we repeat the same sentences consecutively.
If there are just a couple of such repetitions in the blog post, it will not impact our post quality negatively. But too much of it in a blog post makes a blog post monotonous and boring.
If this attribute shows red or amber, it means you have so many such repetitive sentences on your blog post. So you must reduce them using the Yoast SEO color guide.
This is always a simple task as you can manually change your sentence structure or use AI rewriting tools such as Quillbot.
Also, the eye icon in front of these attributes will help you identify where those faulty sentences are in your article. All you have to do is to click on the eye icon and such sentences will be highlighted in your blog post.
With that, you can easily identify the issues that need to be fixed.
Passive voice
Passive voice is bad for your writing quality.
You should avoid them and as much as possible, use the active voice counterpart.
Without too many grammatical explanations, let’s use an illustration to explain the difference between passive voice and the active voice;
Passive voice: I was hugged by mom
Active voice: Mom hugged me
Passive voice: The ball will be hit by Rebecca
Active voice: Rebecca will hit the ball
Passive: A letter was written by Emmanuel
Active: Emmanuel writes a letter
I hope you can relate to these examples.
As a piece of personal advice and from experience, the best way to avoid as much passive voice in an article is to use a lot of “I” and “You” while writing.
These words make your blog post flow interestingly and present your article as a friendly chat between you and your reader rather than a boring lecture.
It also forces you to use more of the active voice tone in your blog post.
Consider these use of “I” and “You”;
You must update your computer
rather than
your computer must be updated.
I will pick it up
rather than
it will be picked up by me
So, if your passive voice indicator shows red or amber, then click the eye icon in front of it and edit the highlighted passive voices into active ones.
You will not have to change all the passive voices that are highlighted in your blog article, but you will have to minimize them until you have an acceptable quantity.
Paragraph length
When paragraphs in your blog articles are too long, it will reduce your Readability score.
Ideally, each paragraph under each of your blog post’s subtitles must not exceed 300 words.
Once again, if your paragraph length score shows red or amber, then click the eye icon and it will highlight the paragraphs with too much text for you to fix.
Subheading distribution
Your blog posts must be structured into headings and subheadings.
As I have already mentioned, each subheading in a blog article should not exceed 300 words.
Subheadings give your article better structure and aid readability and user experience.
If your article is not segmented into subheadings adequately, then Yoast will indicate it in the subheading distribution score with either a red or amber color. It depends on how bad it is.
So you will have to break some of your sections into more subheadings until your color indicator turns to green.
Sentence length
For your blog, each sentence must not exceed 20 words.
This doesn’t mean that once you have a sentence with more than 20 words, your indicator will turn red.
You will only see a red or amber indicator if you have too many such long sentences.
The eye icon will be able to identify these long sentences and then you can shorten them, or break them into different sentences until you have an acceptable number.
Transitional words
If your transition words attribute indicates red, it shows that you’re not using enough transition words on your blog article.
Transition words include words like; “and”, “but”, “so”, and “because”
These words let your articles flow better with your readers.
The red or amber color only shows that you’re not using enough of such words, so the solution is to use more of these words in your article.
Reading ease
This attribute has a lot to do with every other factor of your blog post structure.
The better you optimize your blog post, the higher your reading ease score will rise.
Other factors that affect this score include your grammar and vocabulary.
Generally, you want to write using simple words that your readers will quickly understand.
Tweaking all of these factors will raise your Reading ease score and turn your color indicator into green.
So as you can see, Readability optimization will only be a problem for you when you just begin to write your first few articles.
As you get used to writing, you will build these skillsets instinctively, and soon, even without checking, your articles will comply with these Readability demands. You will only have just a few tweaks to make.
SEO attributes
Click the SEO tab.
Article focus keyphrase
The first thing to do here is to fix the article’s focus key phrase.
Fix in your article focus keyphrase into the keyphrase bar
Your focus keyphrase is the keyphrase that you intend to rank your blog article for on the search engines.
Post title
Your post title is one of the most important aspects of your blog post.
You should go for a well-crafted and irresistible title that will make your potential reader have no choice but click through.
Using Yoast score, you must aim for your blog title score to be at least 70 or more as seen in the image above.
This is how your blog post will appear on the Google search result page.
Slug
Slug is the domain URL that you want your blog post to be identified by. The only rule is that you should keep your slug fairly short. It must also contain your focus keyphrase.
An example of a slug will be:
how to optimize seo of your blogpost
This is not too long or too short and the URL will appear as
www./mydomain/slug
And then it will appear like
www.marblogger.com/how-to-optimize-seo-of-your-blogpost
Meta description
Here you want to write a few lines of an introduction so that your search result on Google can entice clicks to your blog article.
Use the green bar that Yoast provides to write your article introduction in the Meta description as your meta description shouldn’t be too short or long.
Also, you must make sure that you add your focused key phrases in the description a this will be how your article will display on the Google search result page.
Other SEO attributes
Depending on the kinds of error that Yoast picks up on your article, some of these displayed indicators may vary from one blog post to another.
Let’s quickly discuss the ones that are common among all blog articles.
Outbound links
An outbound or external link is a link that leads to an external website different from yours.
As an example, if I add a Google link to my blog post, that Google link is an outbound link.
Therefore you want to add a few relevant external links to your blog post. This has a positive impact on your blog’s SEO rating.
Images
It is always a good practice to include images and infographics to aid the visual feel of your blog post. Doing so fixes the SEO image attribute.
Keyphrase in introduction
You want your blog readers to quickly Know that they are in the right place any time they land on your blog article.
Therefore, you should introduce your keyword in the very first paragraph of your blog article. Doing so fixes any issue with the key phrase in the introduction attribute.
Optimized on page SEO score fixed
Once you’ve taken the time to fix all the Yoast attributes above, your blog post stands a much better chance to rank higher than those of your competitors.
Your blog will also offer a much-improved user experience for your blog visitors.
These attributes are not difficult to fix. As you practice them, soon, it becomes habitual and you will even write blog posts whose SEO attributes are already optimized before checking up on Yoast score.
Conclusion: SEO By Yoast Plugin For Beginners: On Page SEO Check 2022
Many bloggers consider SEO a difficult task to master. This is not always true because there are several aspects of SEO, and as a non-expert, you may not have to implement all of them at once.
On page SEO is one of the most important aspects of SEO.
Thankfully, there are tools and WordPress plugins that can help you fix on page SEO issues by helping you to optimize with well laid down on page SEO check.
A giant among such tools is the SEO by Yoast plugin.
As I already explained in this article, all you need to do is follow these simple Yoast on page SEO check and your blog articles stand a much better chance to rank on popular search engines. It will also give your blog readers a great user experience whenever they find themselves on any of your blog pages.
Apart from the Yoast SEO plugin, do you have any other SEO plugin that is easy to use and deliver excellent on page SEO check? Leave your opinion in the comment box below.
We love to hear from you.