Measure your website page’s SEO quality

If you own and manage your own website you will have probably heard someone tell you about search engine optimization (SEO).  This is the ability to use carefully picked keyword phrases in your website content (and elsewhere) to accurately portray what you do so that when someone does a Google Search for a product or service you provide, that you come up high in search engine results.

Please note that SEO is not the only technique that will help you get a higher search engine result.  Google assess each website page against many rules and regulations, one of which happens to be SEO.

There are 2 pieces to SEO.  The actual keyword phrases that you want to be found for, and how you implement those keyword phrases into your page content (and elsewhere).

For those of you who like to do some research and take action on what you learned, there is a WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO that can guide and educate you on the tactics of SEO.

Yoast SEO is a very full bodied free tool that can be used for more than just SEO but for this post I’m focusing on SEO.  There is a paid version to Yoast SEO as well.

One thing you should note is that Yoast SEO is not a keyword generator. There are a few tools you can use to define what your keyword phrases should be.  If you want to know more about keyword selection here is a great article by Yoast SEO.

The reason I enjoy this plugin is because it is user friendly, full of tips and explanations and personally I think that the best part of the plugin is their “traffic light” system.  Ok so the colours are red, orange and green, rather than red, yellow and green but you get the picture.

Basically by looking for the red, orange and green dots which you can see to the right of your page or post names in WordPress you can see if your page is meeting the necessary SEO requirements (see above screen shot).

When you go into edit your page, there is a whole help area with tips and suggestions on how you can improve this page from an SEO standpoint and achieve a green dot, which is what you want.  See screen shot below of what tips you’re given about each page.

If you’re interested in learning SEO or having a tool tell you what SEO techniques you can improve upon when working on your WordPress website pages, I highly recommend Yoast SEO.