Are we ready for another episode of #techdaddythursday™ even though I am shadowbanned? Which btw I have decided is a cool thing, like I am part of a dangerous gang
I am going to pretend that a lack of response means that you are so excited that you can’t type or click and so I am going to begin even if my initial tweet sent you into a coma of sexual desire!
Today I am going to talk about a specific SEO plugin for wordpress. So if you don’t use it some of what I will talk about will be less than useful, but not all of it. The plugin is Yoast SEO
The Basics
So some basic SEO things to start with. Your posts should be at a minimum 300 words, I suggest that 500 to 800 is optimal. Sometimes you need more space to tell a story in which case feel free to go longer. But once you approach 2k words then you should really consider splitting it into two posts and making it a 2 part story.
As I have said before, readers are fickle creatures, easily bored or distracted. Unless they are part of a weird subset of humanity like me, they don’t want it to be too long. I just read a tweet that I think sums it up
(sorry for lack of attribution because I don’t remember who said it, but I suspect it was from RWA) Your content should be like a skirt. Just long enough to cover the topic.
Though I suppose “kilt” would work as well 🙂 Now that we have covered that I shall move on to the specifics of the Yoast plugin.
Yoast Seo For WordPress
Yoast is one of the plugins I install on almost every site I build. It is simple and works well and it is easy to teach my clients how to use it. Here it is on one of my many D/s Life drafts.
Now you can see that I have titled the post and even written a few words. Not enough to SEO, but enough to show you what is going on. Now you will notice the Yoast thinks it is very readable and has given me a green light. Yoast is wrong. Yoast readability really isn’t geared to blogging so much as it is geared to articles. The difference is that when I blog it is about my feeling and thoughts or a story. When I write an article I am attempting to be informative. So unless I am doing that I tend to ignore it.
Snippet
The snippet is what gets show when someone searches and find your post to show them what the post might be about. Like this search for a D/s Life topic
ALWAYS edit the snippet. This is your chance to catch a readers attention so that they come and read your post instead of all the other people who have written things similar as you, but not as well. Make sure the snippet contains your keyword but you are writing for people and not for machines, so make it interesting, you can see that my snippet for that post isn’t all that great and I should fix it. But I probably won’t since D/s Life was a vanity project, but it can serve as a lesson to you 😉 In this picture you can see that I have edited the snippet to contain the word I want to show up in the google results.
Keyword
You can see that there is a green line under the snippet section. That starts out orange and turns green once I have entered the right number of characters. Now that doesn’t mean anything other than the number is good, not that they are good words. That is my problem because the software has no idea what I have written. But I think it sums up what this post was supposed to be about so I will move on to the next thing. The keyword.
A brief word about keywords. For bloggers who are writers, telling a story. I always advise to find your keyword in your story, so if you are writing about seduction then your keyword might be “lure” if you have used that in your story. For SEO purposes it would like that word to be in the following places.
1) The first paragraph
B) The title of the post
“) The URL of the post
4) The Alt text field of all images in or attached to the post.
Obviously for my post I will use the word “Introspection”
In this image you can see that I have added my keyword and that has changed the SEO score for my post and changed the suggestions that Yoast gives me for making the post more SEO friendly I now have an amber rating, and my goal is of course green
Analysis
So let me fix some of those things. I will add some images to the post with a descriptive alt text that contains my keyword, this is good for SEO and those that use screen readers. Since I am not going to publish this I will just add a picture with these alt text words.
Also the title (for people) is too short so let me add some random words and a longer title and an outbound link and see what that does.
Content is what matters
And there we go, I have made the SEO light green. But here is the thing, it is crap. Because I have just done things for SEO and not for humans, and that is the key to all of this. Write words for people and not for SEO . The green light while good should never be your goal. If I published this people would arrive and go WTF is this trash? And if they were smart, never come back again. SEO is to help you be found, but if you don’t capture the minds of the people that arrive they will never come back again. So write your content first and then do your best to get that green light from Yoast without compromising what you have written.
Thus endeth this weeks #techdaddythurday™ brain dump on Yoast SEO Go in peace and SEO sin no more. But do all the regular sinning you can until next Thursday 🙂 as always TDT has been brought to you by @EroticonUK
Eroticon Technical Director