Good question! OK, so ideally you are aiming for green overall. But each section doesn’t have to be green. However – and this is really important – it doesn’t do anything magical. It’s a helpful guide to help you optimize your blog post for your keyphrase and for readability. But it’s a tool, not something to be slavishly followed to the letter. Use it’ suggestions to help you improve your text, but if you think one of the suggestions would actually make your text worse for your reader, don’t do it just because Yoast told you to. Ultimately what matters is – is it a good and helpful article for your reader?

The free Yoast SEO plugin is a tool you can use to help you improve your SEO (and therefore rankings). You should definitely use an SEO plugin, for all the reasons listed above. However, just installing Yoast SEO won’t magically improve your SEO. First, you need to configure the plugin correctly and then you need to use it to help you optimize your blog posts for your chosen keywords and also readability. But also, there is so much more to SEO that what Yoast can do. I recommend you read this blog post to understand all the different parts of SEO: https://www.productiveblogging.com/beginners-guide-seo/

Thanks for your guide. My site is performing very poorly, so I was wandering if free Yoast SEO plugin can help with ranking or is there something am not doing right?

Aw, thanks Pam!

Aw, that’s so good to hear!

Who’d think before this post there was so much more about Yoast- WOW, so informative and I am so grateful for Eb and Productive Blogging!

Yay – that’s good to hear. I am so pleased you are finding my posts helpful! Eb 🙂