SEO
How to Use Yoast SEO to Improve SEO

In today’s age of digital marketing, SEO is crucial for any business or individual with an online presence. But with so many factors to consider, it can be overwhelming.
Fortunately, there are tools available that can help simplify the process and improve your results. One such tool is Yoast SEO, a WordPress SEO plugin.
In this article, we will explore how to use Yoast SEO to improve your SEO efforts. We will cover the basics of using the plugin, the key features to take advantage of, and how to analyze your content for optimal results.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins available. Its main feature is helping you optimize your blog posts for SEO.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily do things like add meta descriptions, do a basic on-page SEO analysis, and create an XML sitemap to help search engines better index your website.
Yoast SEO is free, but there is also a premium upgrade that offers additional features, such as advanced content analysis, internal linking suggestions, and a redirections manager.
Now we know what Yoast SEO is, let’s take a look at how to get started with the plugin.
Installing the plugin
Installing the plugin is pretty straightforward. In your WordPress dashboard, head over to Plugins > Add new. Then search for “Yoast.”

Simply click “Install” and then “Activate.” Once your plugin is active, you can get started with the first-time setup.
The first-time setup wizard will ask you for some basic information. You can fill these in and, once finished, your installation is complete.

Once you’ve completed the initial setup, even if you choose to do nothing else, Yoast will have already made some changes automatically to your website, including:
Basic settings in Yoast SEO
Once you’ve completed the setup, it’s a good idea to head over to the settings menu. Let’s take a look at some of the noteworthy options.
General settings
The first item under general settings is the “Site features” menu. Here, you will find several different pre-set features that Yoast offers. All are automatically enabled other than “Inclusive language analysis,” so you may want to take a look and enable or disable these as you need.

The “Site basics” and “Site representation” menus will most likely already be completed from your initial setup. This is simply where you decide how you want your site branding to be displayed in search results—for example, your website name, tagline, and logo.
The last item in the general settings menu is “Site connections” (formally webmaster tools). This is where you can verify your site with different tools, including Bing and Google. This allows Yoast to add a verification meta tag to your homepage automatically.

Content types, categories, and tags
The next two sections of the settings menu—“Content types” and “Categories and tags”—all do pretty much the same things. They allow you to control how (and if) entire sections of your site appear in search results.
You can set different content types (pages, posts, categories, etc.) to index or noindex automatically and decide how your title tags are structured for each content type.

You can also set the schema type (article, FAQ, about, etc.) for different content types.

You have to be very careful with these settings, as you can automatically deindex entire sections of your site. Also, having the wrong schema markup can negatively impact your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
I would advise you to leave these settings as they are. If you do want to prevent search engines from indexing certain pages/posts or use a specific type of schema, make those changes in the individual page settings.
Advanced options
For the most part, it is best to leave the advanced options alone unless you’re a seasoned SEO. You certainly don’t want to adjust elements like “Crawl optimizations” if you don’t know what you are doing.

One thing I would recommend is ensuring that breadcrumbs are enabled for your theme. Breadcrumbs are a navigational element and help to make your website more accessible for both users and search engines.

Note that if you use a page builder like Elementor on your website, you may still need to use a shortcode for breadcrumbs to be visible on your pages.
OK, so now that we have covered the basics of getting started, I’m going to walk you through the key features to take advantage of when using Yoast SEO with the WordPress editor.
You can access the Yoast settings by either clicking the symbol in the top right of your WordPress editor to expand the sidebar menu or by using the “Yoast SEO” meta box at the bottom of the page.

This is where you will interact with Yoast most often and can optimize and adjust the standard settings for each individual page. Let’s look at the key features and how to use them.
Focus keyphrase
The first section you need to complete is the “keyphrase” (i.e., your primary keyword). This is where you enter the keyword or phrase you want to rank for in the search results.
You can determine which keywords you want to rank for by using a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to do keyword research.

By completing this, Yoast can analyze your content to see how well optimized it is.
SEO analysis
The SEO analysis section of Yoast aims to advise you on what elements you need to include in your content to have the best chance at ranking for your chosen keyphrase.
Both the SEO and readability analysis tools work on a traffic light system. The more suggested elements you include in your content, the more likely you’ll get the green light.

The plugin works by calculating the frequency of keyphrase usage based on the total word count and checking if the following elements include your chosen keyphrase:
- SEO title of the page
- Introductory paragraph
- Heading(s)
- The URL
- Page content
- Meta description
- Image alt tags
Another great thing about Yoast is how helpful it is. For anyone who needs a member of staff (like a VA) to upload content into WordPress, the plugin can help ensure they remember to include certain elements like meta descriptions.
If someone is new to the role, for example, having a list of things that should be included can be a great tool for training.
Readability scores
The readability analysis in Yoast SEO aims to help you ensure your content is easy to understand and get your message across to website users.

It uses Flesch Reading Ease to measure textual difficulty combined with Yoast’s own algorithm that considers elements like sentence and paragraph length and structure, use of transition words, and passive voice.
Like the SEO analysis, the readability analysis shows which elements are good and which need improvement.
The nice thing about this section is it has a highlighter tool to clearly show where you have issues within your content.
For example, it will give you a percentage of how much of your text is affected by a particular issue. And if you click the “eye” icon on the right of that issue, it will highlight all the areas where that applies. This makes it easy for you to add changes directly in the WordPress editor.

Google preview
In the “Google preview” section, you can see how your page will appear in the search results in both mobile and desktop.

You can edit your URL slug, title tag, and meta description here, and Yoast will advise you if these elements are the right length and contain your keyphrase.
Social previews
This section allows you to see how your content will appear when shared on social platforms, including Facebook and Twitter.

Here, you can set specific feature images, titles, and descriptions for each platform. If you leave these blank, the tool will automatically use the feature image and title from WordPress.

Note that to actually preview how these elements will appear on each social platform, you will need the Yoast SEO Premium plugin.
Schema
Schema markup gives search engines a better understanding of the content on your page and can help you qualify for rich results.
You can use the schema section of the Yoast plugin to help define individual pages such as:
- An FAQ page.
- About pages.
- A checkout page.
The default schema options are set to whatever you assigned in the initial setup. If you didn’t change anything from what Yoast suggests, this would be “Web Page” and “Article.” But you can change these as you need.

Advanced settings
There are a number of different things you can do with the advanced options, including:
- Prevent the page from being indexed by search engines.
- Stop search engines from following links on the page.
- Add a canonical URL for the page.
- Use advanced meta robots parameters (noarchive, nosnippet, etc.).
- Add a breadcrumbs title.

As mentioned previously, you need to be very careful with the advanced options. For the most part, the default settings will be sufficient. If you don’t know what these settings do, then it is best not to mess with them.
By now, it’s clear the Yoast SEO plugin can improve your website’s SEO. But to get the most out of it, it’s best to combine it with some additional plugins that cover areas Yoast doesn’t.
One of the best plugins to use alongside Yoast is the Ahrefs SEO WordPress Plugin.
This plugin is a true time-saver because it gives you recommendations on how to improve the SEO performance for each of your pages based on automated content audits.
On top of that, it takes the keyphrases you already set in Yoast and combines them with data from Ahrefs and Google Search Console to show key SEO metrics right next to your pages.

Yoast also offers several paid plugins (each priced at $79 per year, per site). They work with the free version of Yoast SEO and are built for specific needs like:
- Yoast Local SEO
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO
- Yoast Video SEO
- Yoast News SEO
As mentioned previously, Yoast also offers a premium version with additional features to take control of your site’s SEO at a more advanced level. Here are some of the added benefits of Yoast SEO Premium:
- Ability to add synonyms and related keyphrases
- Internal linking suggestions
- Redirections manager
- 404 monitoring
- Orphaned content finder
- Free access to the Yoast SEO academy
Yoast SEO Premium costs $99 per year, per website. For me, the advanced features are a must. But if you are someone who works with multiple client sites or has a portfolio of your own, this could be an unnecessary cost.
It won’t be fair to discuss Yoast SEO without mentioning if and where it falls short (based on what I experienced).
Yoast is a great plugin for anyone who just wants help to optimize their blog. But if you want more advanced control, for me, Yoast starts to fall flat compared to other SEO plugins.
Many of the more advanced features that you can find in the free version of competing plugins like Rank Math or All In One SEO are either only available with Yoast’s premium features or are non-existent.
For example, Rank Math’s free plugin allows you to:
- Add redirections (available with Yoast Premium).
- Monitor 404 pages (available with Yoast Premium).
- Automate image SEO (automatically add alt text and image titles).
- Integrate with Google Analytics.
- Instant index.
- Use advanced webmaster tools.
- Do local SEO (only available as an additional paid plugin with Yoast SEO).
- Work on WooCommerce SEO (only available as an additional paid plugin with Yoast SEO).

If you only need some basic SEO help on your personal blog or business site, then Yoast works great. But if you need an SEO plugin for multiple sites and you want advanced features, this can start to get costly. If so, it may be time to consider a different option.
Final thoughts
Yoast SEO is an excellent tool for improving your website’s SEO. It can help you analyze your content and make sure your blog posts are optimized for search engines.
The premium upgrade has some excellent features to take your SEO efforts to the next level. However, it is important to note that Yoast is not a one-stop shop for all of your SEO needs. There are still other plugins and techniques that should be used to get the most out of your website’s SEO performance.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
Google Analytics 4 Features To Prepare For Third-Party Cookie Depreciation

Google will roll out new features and integrations for Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for first-party data, enhanced conversions, and durable ad performance metrics.
Beginning in Q1 2024, Chrome will gradually phase out third-party cookies for a percentage of users, allowing for testing and transition.
Third-party cookies, which have been central to cross-site tracking, are being restricted or phased out by major browsers, including Chrome, as part of its Privacy Sandbox project.
The following features should help advertisers “unlock durable performance” while preserving user privacy.
Support For Protected Audience API In GA4
A key feature of recent updates to Google Analytics 4 is the integration of Protected Audience API, a Privacy Sandbox technology that is set to become widely available in early 2024.
This API allows advertisers to continue reaching their audiences after the third-party cookie phase-out.
What Is The Protected Audience API?
The Protected Audience API offers a novel approach to remarketing, which involves reminding users about sites and products they have shown interest in without relying on third-party cookies.

This method involves advertisers informing the browser directly about their interest in showing ads to users in the future.
The browser then uses an algorithm to determine which ads to display based on the user’s web activity and advertiser inputs.
It enables on-device auctions by the browser, allowing it to choose relevant ads from sites previously visited by the user without tracking their browsing behavior across different sites.
Key Features And Development
Key features of the Protected Audience API include interest groups stored by the browser, on-device bidding and ad selection, and ad rendering in a temporarily relaxed version of Fenced Frames.
The API also supports a key/value service for real-time information retrieval, which can be used by both buyers and sellers for various purposes, such as budget calculation or policy compliance.
The Protected Audience API, initially known as the FLEDGE API, has evolved from an experimental stage to a more mature phase, reflecting its readiness for wider implementation.
This transition is part of Google’s broader efforts to develop privacy-preserving APIs and technologies in collaboration with industry stakeholders and regulatory bodies like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.
The Protected Audience API offers a new way to connect with users while respecting their privacy, necessitating a reevaluation of current advertising strategies and a focus on adapting to these emerging technologies.
Support For Enhanced Conversions
Rolling out in the next few weeks, enhanced conversions is a feature enhancing conversion measurement accuracy.


Enhanced conversions for the web cater to advertisers tracking online sales and events. It captures and hashes customer data like email addresses during a conversion on the web, then matches this with Google accounts linked to ad interactions.
This method recovers unmeasured conversions, optimizes bidding, and maintains data privacy.
For leads, enhanced conversions track sales from website leads occurring offline. It uses hashed data from website forms, like email addresses, to measure offline conversions.
Setup options for enhanced conversions include Google Tag Manager, a Google tag, or the Google Ads API, with third-party partner support available.
Advertisers can import offline conversion data for Google Ads from Salesforce, Zapier, and HubSpot with Google Click Identifier (GCLID).
Proper Consent Setup
To effectively use Google’s enhanced privacy features, it’s essential to have proper user consent mechanisms in place, particularly for traffic from the European Economic Area (EEA).
Google’s EU user consent policy mandates consent collection for personal data usage in measurement, ad personalization, and remarketing features. This policy extends to website tags, app SDKs, and data uploads like offline conversion imports.
Google has updated the consent mode API to include parameters for user data consent and personalized advertising.
Advertisers using Google-certified consent management platforms (CMPs) will see automatic updates to the latest consent mode, while those with self-managed banners should upgrade to consent mode v2.
Implementing consent mode allows you to adjust Google tag behavior based on user consent, ensuring compliance and enabling conversion modeling for comprehensive reporting and optimization.
Consent Mode integration with CMPs simplifies managing consent banners and the consent management process, adjusting data collection based on user choices and supporting behavioral modeling for a complete view of consumer performance.
Durable Ad Performance With AI Essentials
To effectively utilize AI, marketers need robust measurement and audience tools for confident decision-making.
Google provided a general checklist of AI essentials for Google advertisers. In it, advertisers are encouraged to adopt AI-powered search and Performance Max campaigns, engage in Smart Bidding, and explore video campaigns on platforms like YouTube.
Google also offers a more in-depth checklist for Google Ads, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager 360.


More Ways To Prepare For The Third-Party Cookie Phase Out
As third-party cookies are phased out, it’s essential to audit and modify web code, especially focusing on instances of SameSite=None using tools like Chrome DevTools.
Adapting to this change involves understanding and managing both third-party and first-party cookies, ensuring they are set correctly for cross-site contexts and compliance.
Chrome provides solutions like Partitioned cookies with CHIPS and Related Website Sets.
At the same time, the Privacy Sandbox introduces APIs for privacy-centric alternatives, with additional support for enterprise-managed Chrome and ongoing development of tools and trials to assist in the transition.
As Google continues to update resources and documentation to reflect these changes, stakeholders are encouraged to engage and provide feedback, ensuring that the evolution of these technologies aligns with industry needs and user privacy standards.
Featured image: Primakov/Shutterstock
SEO
4 Ways To Try The New Model From Mistral AI

In a significant leap in large language model (LLM) development, Mistral AI announced the release of its newest model, Mixtral-8x7B.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5546272da9065eddeb6fcd7ffddeef5b75be79a7&dn=mixtral-8x7b-32kseqlen&tr=udp%3A%2F%https://t.co/uV4WVdtpwZ%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%https://t.co/g0m9cEUz0T%3A80%2Fannounce
RELEASE a6bbd9affe0c2725c1b7410d66833e24
— Mistral AI (@MistralAI) December 8, 2023
What Is Mixtral-8x7B?
Mixtral-8x7B from Mistral AI is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model designed to enhance how machines understand and generate text.
Imagine it as a team of specialized experts, each skilled in a different area, working together to handle various types of information and tasks.
A report published in June reportedly shed light on the intricacies of OpenAI’s GPT-4, highlighting that it employs a similar approach to MoE, utilizing 16 experts, each with around 111 billion parameters, and routes two experts per forward pass to optimize costs.
This approach allows the model to manage diverse and complex data efficiently, making it helpful in creating content, engaging in conversations, or translating languages.
Mixtral-8x7B Performance Metrics
Mistral AI’s new model, Mixtral-8x7B, represents a significant step forward from its previous model, Mistral-7B-v0.1.
It’s designed to understand better and create text, a key feature for anyone looking to use AI for writing or communication tasks.
New open weights LLM from @MistralAI
params.json:
– hidden_dim / dim = 14336/4096 => 3.5X MLP expand
– n_heads / n_kv_heads = 32/8 => 4X multiquery
– “moe” => mixture of experts 8X top 2 👀Likely related code: https://t.co/yrqRtYhxKR
Oddly absent: an over-rehearsed… https://t.co/8PvqdHz1bR pic.twitter.com/xMDRj3WAVh
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) December 8, 2023
This latest addition to the Mistral family promises to revolutionize the AI landscape with its enhanced performance metrics, as shared by OpenCompass.
What makes Mixtral-8x7B stand out is not just its improvement over Mistral AI’s previous version, but the way it measures up to models like Llama2-70B and Qwen-72B.
It’s like having an assistant who can understand complex ideas and express them clearly.
One of the key strengths of the Mixtral-8x7B is its ability to handle specialized tasks.
For example, it performed exceptionally well in specific tests designed to evaluate AI models, indicating that it’s good at general text understanding and generation and excels in more niche areas.
This makes it a valuable tool for marketing professionals and SEO experts who need AI that can adapt to different content and technical requirements.
The Mixtral-8x7B’s ability to deal with complex math and coding problems also suggests it can be a helpful ally for those working in more technical aspects of SEO, where understanding and solving algorithmic challenges are crucial.
This new model could become a versatile and intelligent partner for a wide range of digital content and strategy needs.
How To Try Mixtral-8x7B: 4 Demos
You can experiment with Mistral AI’s new model, Mixtral-8x7B, to see how it responds to queries and how it performs compared to other open-source models and OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Please note that, like all generative AI content, platforms running this new model may produce inaccurate information or otherwise unintended results.
User feedback for new models like this one will help companies like Mistral AI improve future versions and models.
1. Perplexity Labs Playground
In Perplexity Labs, you can try Mixtral-8x7B along with Meta AI’s Llama 2, Mistral-7b, and Perplexity’s new online LLMs.
In this example, I ask about the model itself and notice that new instructions are added after the initial response to extend the generated content about my query.


While the answer looks correct, it begins to repeat itself.


The model did provide an over 600-word answer to the question, “What is SEO?”
Again, additional instructions appear as “headers” to seemingly ensure a comprehensive answer.


2. Poe
Poe hosts bots for popular LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL·E 3, Meta AI’s Llama 2 and Code Llama, Google’s PaLM 2, Anthropic’s Claude-instant and Claude 2, and StableDiffusionXL.
These bots cover a wide spectrum of capabilities, including text, image, and code generation.
The Mixtral-8x7B-Chat bot is operated by Fireworks AI.


It’s worth noting that the Fireworks page specifies it is an “unofficial implementation” that was fine-tuned for chat.
When asked what the best backlinks for SEO are, it provided a valid answer.


Compare this to the response offered by Google Bard.


3. Vercel
Vercel offers a demo of Mixtral-8x7B that allows users to compare responses from popular Anthropic, Cohere, Meta AI, and OpenAI models.


It offers an interesting perspective on how each model interprets and responds to user questions.


Like many LLMs, it does occasionally hallucinate.


4. Replicate
The mixtral-8x7b-32 demo on Replicate is based on this source code. It is also noted in the README that “Inference is quite inefficient.”


In the example above, Mixtral-8x7B describes itself as a game.
Conclusion
Mistral AI’s latest release sets a new benchmark in the AI field, offering enhanced performance and versatility. But like many LLMs, it can provide inaccurate and unexpected answers.
As AI continues to evolve, models like the Mixtral-8x7B could become integral in shaping advanced AI tools for marketing and business.
Featured image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock
SEO
OpenAI Investigates ‘Lazy’ GPT-4 Complaints On Google Reviews, X

OpenAI, the company that launched ChatGPT a little over a year ago, has recently taken to social media to address concerns regarding the “lazy” performance of GPT-4 on social media and Google Reviews.

This move comes after growing user feedback online, which even includes a one-star review on the company’s Google Reviews.
OpenAI Gives Insight Into Training Chat Models, Performance Evaluations, And A/B Testing
OpenAI, through its @ChatGPTapp Twitter account, detailed the complexities involved in training chat models.


The organization highlighted that the process is not a “clean industrial process” and that variations in training runs can lead to noticeable differences in the AI’s personality, creative style, and political bias.
Thorough AI model testing includes offline evaluation metrics and online A/B tests. The final decision to release a new model is based on a data-driven approach to improve the “real” user experience.
OpenAI’s Google Review Score Affected By GPT-4 Performance, Billing Issues
This explanation comes after weeks of user feedback about GPT-4 becoming worse on social media networks like X.
Idk if anyone else has noticed this, but GPT-4 Turbo performance is significantly worse than GPT-4 standard.
I know it’s in preview right now but it’s significantly worse.
— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) November 8, 2023
There has been discussion if GPT-4 has become “lazy” recently. My anecdotal testing suggests it may be true.
I repeated a sequence of old analyses I did with Code Interpreter. GPT-4 still knows what to do, but keeps telling me to do the work. One step is now many & some are odd. pic.twitter.com/OhGAMtd3Zq
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 28, 2023
Complaints also appeared in OpenAI’s community forums.


The experience led one user to leave a one-star rating for OpenAI via Google Reviews. Other complaints regarded accounts, billing, and the artificial nature of AI.


A recent user on Product Hunt gave OpenAI a rating that also appears to be related to GPT-4 worsening.


GPT-4 isn’t the only issue that local reviewers complain about. On Yelp, OpenAI has a one-star rating for ChatGPT 3.5 performance.
OpenAI is now only 3.8 stars on Google Maps and a dismal 1 star on Yelp!
GPT-4’s degradation has really hurt their rating. Hope the business survives.https://t.co/RF8uJH1WQ5 pic.twitter.com/OghAZLCiVu
— Nate Chan (@nathanwchan) December 9, 2023
The complaint:


In related OpenAI news, the review with the most likes aligns with recent rumors about a volatile workplace, alleging that OpenAI is a “Cutthroat environment. Not friendly. Toxic workers.”


The reviews voted the most helpful on Glassdoor about OpenAI suggested that employee frustration and product development issues stem from the company’s shift in focus on profits.


This incident provides a unique outlook on how customer and employee experiences can impact any business through local reviews and business ratings platforms.


Google SGE Highlights Positive Google Reviews
In addition to occasional complaints, Google reviewers acknowledged the revolutionary impact of OpenAI’s technology on various fields.
The most positive review mentions about the company appear in Google SGE (Search Generative Experience).


Conclusion
OpenAI’s recent insights into training chat models and response to public feedback about GPT-4 performance illustrate AI technology’s dynamic and evolving nature and its impact on those who depend on the AI platform.
Especially the people who just received an invitation to join ChatGPT Plus after being waitlisted while OpenAI paused new subscriptions and upgrades. Or those developing GPTs for the upcoming GPT Store launch.
As AI advances, professionals in these fields must remain agile, informed, and responsive to technological developments and the public’s reception of these advancements.
Featured image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
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