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Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that gathers, into a single panel, the technical settings that help search engines understand a site: titles, descriptions, sitemap, structured data and indexing rules. It has a free version, which is the one nearly everybody uses, and it installs like any other plugin.
| Installing Yoast is not doing SEO. It tidies the house: it does not pick the words people search for, it does not write the content, it does not earn links from other sites and it does not make the server faster. No green score inside WordPress replaces any of that. |
What it handles for you
| Feature | What it does |
| Title and description | Sets the text shown in the search result, instead of whatever the theme invents, with automatic templates per page type |
| XML sitemap | Generates and keeps up to date the list of addresses handed to search engines |
| Structured data | Markup saying whether this is an article, a product, a local business or an FAQ |
| Indexing and canonical | Which pages enter the index, and which version of repeated content is the official one |
| Social sharing | The image and text that appear when someone pastes the address into Facebook or WhatsApp |
| robots file and .htaccess | Lets you edit them from inside WordPress, without opening the file manager |
| Internal links | Counts how many links a page receives from within the site itself |
The traffic lights, and what they really measure
Yoast puts two coloured dots under every page: one for the SEO analysis and one for readability. They are checklists, not the opinion of Google.
| Signal | What it means |
| SEO analysis | Compares the text with the key phrase you typed: whether it is in the title, the address, the first paragraph, the images |
| Readability | Looks at sentence length, passive voice, subheadings and long paragraphs. It is writing advice, not search advice |
| Green | You met the checklist. It does not mean the page will do well |
| Orange or red | An item is missing. Sometimes ignoring it is the right call |
| Green is not a position. No plugin knows the Google algorithm and none can guarantee you a place. Stuffing repetitions into the text to light up the green dot makes the text worse for the person reading it, and that is the person who decides whether to buy. |
The free version and the paid one
The free version covers the essentials above and is enough for the overwhelming majority of sites. There is a paid version, called Premium, and artificial-intelligence extras sold separately. They are products of Yoast, the company that makes the plugin, and they are bought directly from them. We neither sell nor resell them.
The rule that avoids most of the trouble
Never two SEO plugins at once. Both try to control titles, sitemap and canonical, and WordPress ends up taking contradictory orders. If you are still deciding which to install, see the best SEO plugins for WordPress and how to choose one.
What is not the plugin’s job, but ours
Speed, uptime and a valid certificate all count for search engines, and no plugin fixes them. If the site is slow, see what actually makes a difference. If the padlock is missing, see the causes, in order.
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Site is slow and you suspect the plugin is not the problem? Ask us to look |
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