How to use WordPress SEO by Yoast and Scribe SEO?

WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast and Scribe SEO premium plugin are two essential plugins we use for optimizing page content. Here is a brief guide on search engine optimizing your posts using these.

Scribe SEO WordPress plugin

In your post / page edit view, you have two sections for SEO called:

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
2. Scribe Keyword research, Scribe Content Optimizer, Scribe Link building.
WordPress SEO is a popular free plugin and quite straight forward.

For each post, you have to add a SEO Title and Meta description.

SEO Title can be different from the actual post title you display in site. This SEO title will be displayed in search engine results. This title should be keyword rich and brief. The primary keyword should be placed at the beginning. You have up to 70 characters space for this.

Meta description is the snippet you see below search result titles. You have 156 character limit for this. You should write a brief and interesting summary of the page, again with your keywords.

If you fill the “focus keyword” section, it will evaluate your page and provide you suggestions. Sometimes you may give a generic short keyword as focus keyword and have different variations in title, meta description and content. This should be OK.

Once you are done with this, you can check the Page analysis to make sure you follow some of the basic requirements.

You can ignore the advanced tab in this. With this you should be done with WordPress SEO plugin settings.

Next is Scribe SEO.

To begin with, you can input your chosen keyword and click “Get keyword ideas”. This widget is in sidebar right top.

You can get keywords based on exact match, phrase match or in a general manner.

This too will provide you the annual search volume of all keyword variations. It is not always good to target the highest volume as it may also have high competition to rank. It will be good to get an idea from this and use a mix of keywords throughout your content.

Next comes Scribe content optimizer. This will work only when you have all three tick marks for title, meta description and content are shown ready.

Once you click analyse, you will get a score out of 100%. It will show you how you can improve the page. It is possible to get a 100% score as shown in this example, but it is not always the target. Even pages above 70% can do well. More than the actual score, it is the areas in which you lag that should be taken care of as needed.

The Scribe analysis page has many more tabs which you shall go through. Reading through SEO best practices shall give you a good overview. Also, please note what your primary keywords are as found by the analysis. Sometimes, unintentionally we might have given importance for non-keywords. You can try to edit the post and remove those unnecessary keywords and implement keyword variations for relevant keywords that have a high density. Even a genuine abundance of a primary keyword in a short post can be mistaken for keyword stuffing.

Next comes Scribe link building widget. You can use this to find authoritative pages within your own website and blogosphere, social media. I have found this not to be so relevant. So, you can ignore this. But, please do take care to promote your content in appropriate forums and social media. Also, remember to link to related posts within your own website. This will retain your visitors while also increasing the PageRank.

That should be all for improving page content for SEO. While following basic requirements, it is also important to keep in mind the value for the end-user and not do anything mechanically just for the sake of it.