Optimise your charity website for better search performance

We've written in the past about better ways of optimising your website content through thinking through your content titself to choosing and configuring effective SEO websites from scratch. In this blog I want to focus exclusively on content production and editing using Yoast as your assistant on your Wordpress website.

If you are using Wordpress for your chairty or education website you may have heard of Yoast or possibly have it installed already. If so, I hope the following helps you make the most out of it and if Yoast is new to you I hope this article prompts you to try it out.

What is Yoast? Yoast is best described as an assistant for people wanting their site to perform more effectively on Google. It isn't a heavily technical plugin that does a lot of behind the scenes work to magically help your rankings. However, what it does is to analyse your site and hand-hold you through making improvements. Admittedly, some of what it does is technical - it can help with your site map, meta tags, image meta data etc - in short it will provide a reasonably non-technical review of your site and help you remedy any issies or errors. If your site has been well set up and you've been helped by your digital agency with many of the basics, this aspect of the tool will certainly be of use but perhaps isn't where Yoast's strengths really lie. What it does really well is analyse your website content and assist you as you edit and improve your messaging. It can help with punctuation and sentence structure, leading you to write content that both the search engines and your users will find easier to understand. Yoast can help you better structure your page length and also organise pages into sensible categories. What is key to the process is that Yoast actually gets you to think really hard about your content and how you are using it. I know most content editors do this already as a matter of course but Yoast is a bit like a very conscientious teacher that can help you to rethink your assumptions and hone your content until a page really sings. 

Yoast is not a quick fix and it won't take away from you the burden of optimisng your site content. At times, it can be frustrating to use as you can feel like your homework is being marked and you are consistently failing. But approached with openness and a willingness to learn, Yoast will help you gain results.