Optimize Your WordPress Blog With SEO Yoast Plugin

When chatting with lawyers about the benefits of blogging and sharing the tools and practices that make it less burdensome, eyes glaze over by the time I get to navigating Search Engine Optimization, Google Keyword Tool, etc. To ease concerns, I suggest using WordPress as the blogging platform and installing the free, powerful, SEO Yoast plugin.
In a nutshell, the plugin guides you through three optimizing techniques for each blog post: Focus Keywords, SEO Title, and Meta Description.
The example below shows the plugin at work for this post. I created the tite, “Optimize Your WordPress Blog With SEO Yoast Plugin.” When I started entering the first few words, the phrase “optimize your wordpress blog” came up as a keyword (or key phrase) so I went with that. I could have, instead, optimized it for “SEO Yoast Plugin,” which is also a recognized keyword, but I chose the former since I want those searching for how to optimize a WordPress blog to find the post – and not everyone that searches for it will have knowledge of SEO Yoast. Caution: Don’t go overboard: make sure your title accurately represents the content or message of your post and it’s readable and not crammed with keywords.

Since the blog post title is now optimized, simply copy and paste it into the SEO Title box. Or, if you prefer a long, descriptive title, use a shortened version – up to 70 characters – for your SEO Title. The Snippet Preview demonstrates how the title will appear in the search engine results page (SERP) and on Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and other social sites.
Finally, add a meta description up to 156 characters, and you’re done.
Click on the “Page Analysis” tab to find SEO details on what you’ve done well with the post and what’s still lacking:

For more information on the plugin and WordPress SEO (with over 4.5 million downloads!), check out the developer’s site.
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