Using the Focus Keyword Feature of the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is a plugin which makes SEO easier for all bloggers running blogs on WordPress. WordPress SEO is probably the most useful SEO plugin for WordPress.

Official Plugin Link: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

In this post, we will see how to optimize our blogposts for search engines using the Focus Keyword feature of this plugin. Once you have the plugin installed and activated, just go on create a new post and then continue reading to start using this feature.

Start writing your post and once you have a post draft saved, just go to the plugin section on your edit post page and enter your focus keyword for the particular post. Note that focus keyword can be either a single word or a short phrase.

Case 1:

For instance, let’s say for this post, my focus keyword is “wordpress seo”. I will enter “wordpress seo” in the focus keyword and press tab. This will show the SEO analysis as follows:

Case 2:

I am now changing the focus keyword to “focus keyword” just to see how that performs on the SEO analysis. Enter “focus keyword” and press tab and the analysis will change automatically as follows:

Case 3:

Just assume that the focus keyword here was “blogposts”. If we enter blogposts then the new analysis is as follows:

Now, we see that the post is optimized for the keywords “wordpress seo” and “focus keyword” but not optimized at some levels for “blogposts”. So, if we really want the focus keyword to be blogposts, then the plugin tells us that we need to change the article heading, page title, and page URL to reflect blogposts and optimize the post for search engines. The best part is you can change all the elements like heading, title, URL, content (of course) and description from the same interface with the help of the combined power of WordPress + Yoast!

So all you need to do for good SEO is that you choose the right focus keyword and make sure all those fields in the SEO analysis show GREEN!