SEO is an integral part of your website’s development. It provides the opportunity for your potential customers – in our case, scientists, engineers and technologists, to easily locate you and in turn, increase website traffic. In my earlier blog, I highlighted the basic steps for those of you looking to learn the ropes – this blog is designed to take you to the next level.
The most effective SEO tool I am currently using is YOAST. This is a plug-in that is designed for use with the WordPress website management system. I have highlighted below the three functions that I have found most useful:
- Editing post titles and meta descriptions – This function allows you to preview exactly how your post will look before you upload it onto your website. When using this function, you should be conscious of using ‘focus keywords’ that are relevant to your post, this enhances the content quality of your website. Another handy point is that this function allows you to put in all the hard work behind the scenes before sharing it with the world.
- Permalink clean up – This feature allows you to be found by the URL’s that you share rather than having unusual variables that are added by others. For example, www.ec-pr.com/blog is a simple URL to be directed to our blog instead of a link with a large amount of irrelevant and questionable numbers or letters.
- Content analysis tool – This by far is the most useful tool provided by the Yoast plug-in! This tool offers you real time analysis of content being added. It outlines whether the information being uploaded is good, bad or ok and then suggests specific ways of improving it.
The Yoast plug-in is proving to be a useful tool – helping me to improve SEO in a simple, cost effective and stress-free way. In this digital world we live in, strong website visibility is critical. Make sure you take advantage of all your available resources! 🙂
