Yoast is one of the most famous WordPress SEO plugins. Most of the technical aspects of SEO you need to do actually are covered by Yoast.

Everyone these days are trying to rank their website’s content higher in Google. There are marketing firms earning a great deal of money in relation to the most notorious digital term these days, “SEO optimisation”, but if you do some heavy research you can do this yourself with one of the best SEO applications Yoast.

We believe that Yoast is the most complete SEO solution for your WordPress site. With a bunch of features and options this plugin provides an alternate to the users of another famous SEO plugin named All in One SEO Pack.

Some of Yoast’s awesome features are:

• Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis.
• Google search result snippet previews.
• Focus keyword testing.
• Meta Robots configuration.
• Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for Google Custom Search.
• Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
• XML Sitemaps
• .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
• Ability to verify Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Tools

But as good as Yoast is, you still need to start from the ground up.

The first step in optimising any website for a search engine is to start thinking about the searching strategies of your audience.

What search strategies do they have?

Which search terms will they use?

These questions are the beginning of your keyword research. Keyword research is actually the basis of all search marketing. You have to know which search terms people use when looking for your website or product.

What makes your website unique?

What idea or product do you ‘sell’ ?

And why should people buy this from you?

Make sure your mission is clear in your mind as well as on your website. You want to be found on the terms that fit your site. You want to be found by your potential customers. Ranking on terms that don’t fit your site, will result in a high bounce rate (visitors immediately leave your site, because your site is not what they expect it to be).

A high bounce rate indeed indicates that your website does not fit the search needs of customers and Google could well adjust the ranking after high bounce rates. A high bounce rate could eventually lead to a lower ranking in Google.

Next week we will discuss in detail more about SEO planning and marketing for your site.