Boom goes the dynamite! Ahem, I mean, Yoast is awesome!
Overall Satisfaction with Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins
We use Yoast as a tool and guide to optimize our content pages for SEO. It helps us better understand how the content on the page, page title and descriptions align with our target keyword for the content.
Pros
- Strengths: the plugin is super easy to use, and the color coding showing when things are good, medium (needs work), or bad. It makes it easy to sort through a list of posts and see which ones need improvement. It also makes it easy to ensure that new posts going live are focused on a keyword and are checking off the largest amount of the SEO checklist for an optimized article as can be. The plugin also: makes and publishes a sitemap to list in the Google Search Console to help maximize the indexing of your site, it automatically ads the rel="canonical" to each page, unless you specify otherwise, which is great it's one less thing to code into the theme. Yoast also adds the Organization schema to the site, which is nice for updating the Google Knowledge Graph data, but it's a fairly low-impact feature.
Cons
- I would really like the Yoast plugin to add more of the Schema functionality to each page and post. Especially if it could add the JSON-LD formatting for blog posts and other page posts. Right now it's not as big of an impact on overall SEO performance, but as a built-in feature it would be great to have it site-wide before it becomes and absolutely critical element to have.
- Weakness: it's easy to misunderstand and think that the Yoast plugin is "doing" SEO for you. That's a total misconception, the plugin is a guide to help manage your SEO for each page. The only thing the Yoast plugin does for you are the things listed in strengths.
- The plugin has helped our outsourced content team stay focused with their posts, and multiple posts from within the last 4 weeks have already begun ranking in the top 20 without doing any link building. That's the power of focus!
- Ultimate SEO
Ultimate SEO is a pretty good plugin, but it's really meant more for the "power-user" SEO person. For the average user I've found from feedback to be too complicated.
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