Having studied Google Analytics for hundreds of websites, one thing I see across the board when it comes to content-heavy sites (like blogs…) is that over time, the biggest source of traffic is organic search for most websites.
If you’re running on WordPress, the free Yoast SEO plugin is a no-brainer. It makes it super easy for you to make some quick and fast improvements to your WordPress blog.
There are a bunch of SEO plugins available for WordPress, but Yoast is really the one that has the best trackrecord over a long period of time, even though they weren’t the first to tackle this problem.
You can also visit their website for some great resources and instructions on how to get the most value out of the Yoast plugin, which is super useful when you lack a basic SEO knowledge.
Quick pointers how to improve posts
What’s more, it’s just super useful for your day-to-day blogging needs.
Underneath every blog post, you’ll see something like this:
Yoast makes it very easy to preview and edit the metadata that determines how your website will show up in the Google SERPs.
What’s more, it always gives a quick assessment of each post you’re writing and suggestions on how to improve it.
Don’t follow these guidelines religiously—it’s totally okay to disregard them. Know the rules, but be free to break them.
My favorite part is actually the readability tab:
It’s like having an editor bot for every of your blog posts.
(Speaking of which, I’m so excited when there are actually great editor bots! I’m sure this is not too far ahead in the future, given all the advances in AI that are happening.)
XML-sitemaps
It’s super important to have sitemaps to make it easy for Google to crawl your website. Of course, Yoast takes care of that for you! If you don’t know what XML sitemaps are, and why you should care, learn more about sitemaps here. (It’s a somewhat dry, but informative and constantly update article that explains the most important things you should know about sitemaps pretty succinctly).