We can probably live without Yoast.

byHamish-S

302 followers

8 years ago

Hey all. I hope you're doing well and having fun getting your sites up and running.

I thought I'd share something related to the All-in-in SEO VS YOAST debate that you may have seen in a lot of discussions here.

I tried Yoast out to see what the fuss was about and, basically, the appeal is that it gives you a checklist to see how well you've set your content up for SEO ranking. You get a series of bullet points and if you've done everything right, they should all be green. If not, they might be orange or red.

I could definitely see the appeal but there were a few things that gave me pause. One is that there's an item on the checklist about keyword density which seems to encourage keyword stuffing, which seems like the type of activity that make Google think your post was spam. With your keyword appearing even three times throughout the post, you won't come near getting a green light for that checklist item.

However, I also encountered a lot of bugs too, with Yoast telling me that things were missing when they weren't. For instance, it told me that one of my posts didn't have the target keyword in the title when I could see it right there in front of me.

Then I wondered something. Why would we need a possibly buggy plugin to tell us if we're doing everything correctly or not? All we need is a checklist.

So here is the checklist of items that Yoast looks for:

• Have youused this focus keyword for any other posts on your blog? If not, it’s better.

• Does thefocus keyword appear in the URL for this page?

• Does yourpage title contain the focus keyword at the beginning?

• Is yourtitle between 40 and 70 characters long?

• Have youoptimized your meta description? It can be up to 156 characters.

• Does yourmeta description include the focus keyword?

• Does yourfocus keyword appear in the first paragraph of the copy?

• Do thealt tags for your images contain your focus keyword?

• Are theremore than 300 words in this post?

There are a few others that I left off that list but they are not necessary:

• Have youused your focus keyword in any subheadings (such as an H2) in your copy? >Not important.

• Is thekeyword found at least two times in the post? > Forget about keyworddensity. This leads to keyword stuffing.

• Do you have outboundlinks in your post? > Not necessary.

Do we really need an automated program to check those things for us? I think not. Perhaps we are better off just using our eyes.

And if you made the switch like me and were similarly disappointed, it's the easiest thing in the world to go back to All-in-One SEO. Just deactivate and delete Yoast. Reinstall All-in-One SEO and you are good to go. When I tried it, I found all my original meta-descriptions came back too.

Hope this helps!