If you have ever done SEO, you likely have heard about Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is a free SEO plugin for self-hosted WordPress websites that can help you improve certain aspects of your SEO. Yoast SEO also has a premium option that gives you even more optimization options and features. Whether you are considering the free or paid version of the plugin, you might wonder whether it is worth installing on your website. This is a complicated question to answer, so we will be looking at notable features and considering whether they would influence your decision to install this plugin.

Keyword Optimization

Yoast SEO adds a metabox at the bottom of your post edit screen. This metabox allows you to easily edit your delta title and meta description, ensuring they contain your focus keyword and are not too long. You also get a snippet preview, readability analysis and SEO analysis. However, the paid version gives you a few more features.

For example, it analyses your content for keywords related to your focus keyword. Google understands people do not use the same phrases multiple times in their content and instead use variations like synonyms and plurals all the time.

Yoast SEO allows you to optimise for these related terms and synonyms, so your content feels more natural; something that Google is looking for.

Permalink Redirection

Dead links are a huge problem for SEO because no one wants to see a 404 when looking for certain content. Yoast SEO automatically redirects any URLs you change. This ensures you do not have 404 pages when the URL of an indexed post changes. While there are free plugins that can do this, Yoast SEO is the only one that does this automatically.

If you have a large site or one you update regularly, you will find the plugin worth it for this specific feature.

Hide Content from Search Engines

There are many reasons you might not want a page to be indexed. One of these is where you create a landing page that you only want people to access after providing their name and address.

Yoast SEO allows you to add no-index to pages so search engines do not index them. It also allows you to hide other pages such as author, no-index categories, archive, and tag pages.

Internal Linking Suggestion

Internal links are crucial for helping search engines better understand your website and content. A page with more links pointing to it, whether internal or external, is deemed more important and thus ranks higher.

Yoast SEO shows you links containing related content that you can add to your content before posting it. This is useful for all kinds of content, especially cornerstone content. Cornerstone content is your most important content, and it should have as many links pointing to it as possible.

Conclusion

Yoast SEO has a set of useful features that you can find on other SEO plugins. However, what makes Yoast SEO worth it is that it brings these features together in one convenient place in addition to providing courses and articles on how to use them all.