Yoast SEO optimizer

- In the previous video, we ran this analysis on one of our blog posts. We put a key phrase, or key word into our Yoast plugin, and we got a ton of multi-colored bullet points back. Right now, we only have a couple of green bullet points, and the rest are orange or red. So there's a lot of optimizing that we can do. Yoast takes SEO best practices and puts them in this plug in. I found that these recommendations are both reliable, and practical. Let's go through a couple of these and see how we can make some optimizations for our site. We can click on any of these and learn a little bit more about them. A couple that are easy, are slug stop words. We have a stop word in our slug. Search engines don't love stop words like to, and, but, or, stuff like that. So let's remove that. We can scroll up a little bit, and we can click on edit snippet, and we can see our slug right here. We can remove "a" from the slug, which makes the URL a little bit cleaner, and will make Google happier. We can see that that orange bullet point went away. We've another orange light right here for image alt attributes. When you don't add an alt description to an image, you will see this bullet. We can go over here to our featured image, click on it, and then add an alt description to this image. You should do this for every single one of your images. I'll call this baking pans and cookie cutters. If we had more time, I'd add more images to this post, and I'd make sure they all have alt descriptions. If you don't have any images, or if the images don't all have alt descriptions, you might still see this warning. We also see right here, the meta description length is too short. And we can probably write a little more to: 1. Make this message more compelling, and 2. Maximize the space. Let's go back up to our meta description, right here, and since our key phrase is cake decorating tools, I can say, each of my cake decorating tools. Saves me hours and hours of manual labor. Notice this indicator is now green because I'm in the optimal length. If I delete this word, we're now in the orange zone. So let's go back. This also fixed a red bullet up here that mentioned that we didn't actually have our key phrase in our meta description. Now we took care of that as well. Now let's fix some of these problems. There are two problems we can fix at one point. Key phrase in the title, and SEO title width. We don't have our key phrase in the title and the title is too long so let's take care of both of these. We can add "cake decorating tools I use every day" to the title. I'll scroll up to the top of my blog post. Cake Decorating Tools I Use Everyday. We can scroll back down, and we can see that the title is now the optimum length, and I have Cake Decorating Tools, which is the key phrase we're looking for, as the first part of our headline, which is a good practice. And those problems went away. If your post title is still too long, you can click into the title box and delete the site title. This is enough optimizing for right now. Originally, we had four green bullets and now we have seven. We had a lot more problems, and a lot more improvements. Update this post, and now we're done. Again, I want to emphasize, this might feel like a lot of work at first, but you'll very quickly internalize these best practices and you'll start to do it automatically.