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What Exactly Is the Yoast SEO Premium Plugin?

Yoast SEO Premium is a well-known WordPress plugin that assists webmasters in optimizing their WordPress websites for search engines.

Characteristics

Optimization of Posts and Pages

This is the Yoast plugin’s bread and butter.

Yoast makes it simple to add title and description tags to WordPress pages and posts.

A “Snippet Preview” of how your page will appear in Google’s search results is also available.

To be fair, an increasing number of WordPress themes allow you to write titles and meta descriptions in the post and page editor.

But the good thing with Yoast is that you can preserve all of your page’s meta information… even if you change themes.

Problems

Yoast displays SEO issues that it discovers… within your WordPress dashboard.

As you can see, Yoast found no SEO concerns.

However, if Yoast encounters any problems, you will be notified.

Social Cards

Creating social media cards can be a huge nuisance.

After all, each social network (such as Twitter and Facebook) has its own set of regulations and criteria regarding character limitations and image size.

Enter Yoast’s social feature.

It allows you to effortlessly generate social cards from your WordPress editor.

In fact, this is how Backlinko generates social cards. I’m a little prejudiced, but I think our content looks great when people share it.

If you subscribe to Yoast Premium, you can even receive a preview of how your material will appear when shared on social media… before it goes live.

Optimization of Content

This feature is divided into the following sections:

• Readability: This determines the reading level of your text (and provides some tips on how to improve your writing).
• Focus Keyword: This is where you give Yoast a “Focus Keyword”… It also assists you in optimizing your post around that term.

This is one of the few features of Yoast that I dislike.

Why?

Because it looks at really old school SEO criteria that are no longer relevant (like keyword density)

And I’ve spoken with a number of WordPress SEO newbies who work hard to get “all green lights”… despite the fact that keyword stuffing might cause more harm than good.

Having stated that:

This section also contains some extremely useful advice. Yoast, for example, notifies you if your page or post has an SEO-friendly URL.

So, if they removed the information regarding keyword density and key length, I’d say this function is quite useful.

• Cornerstone Material: A new Yoast feature that allows you to tell Yoast, “This is some of the best content we’ve ever written.” When you publish new posts, Yoast will ensure that they link back to your Cornerstone content.

Webmaster Resources

This feature allows you to confirm your Google Search Console account.

Advanced

You can add the “no index” tag to pages and posts here, as well as create canonical tags and modify your robots.txt settings.

Internal Linking

This is a premium Yoast feature aimed to make internal connecting a little easier.

This is how it works:

First, you compose a blog post like you typically would.

Then, Yoast will scan your page for terms and phrases that you can use to create internal links to other pages on your site.

Helpful.

Sitemaps

Yoast is my go-to tool for building sitemaps.

Yes, there are numerous standalone plugins available that can build an XML sitemap for you.

But why install another plugin when Yoast does the same (if not better) job?

Search Appearance

This is where you may change many of your WordPress site’s global settings.

General: Allows you to choose how you want the title of your page and the name of your website to be separated.

From this page, you can also change the SEO settings for your homepage.

Content Types: Allows you to customize the default settings for all of your WordPress pages and posts. You can, for example, noindex all of your posts.

Taxonomies: Create rules for WordPress category pages, tags, and more.

Archive: Set up rules for your author pages in the archive (including my preference: not having them).

Breadcrumbs: Assists you in creating breadcrumb navigation for your website.

RSS Feed: Configuration for your blog’s RSS feed.

Tools

This is where you can bulk import or export your SEO information as well as make mass updates to your site’s pages all at once.