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This is Tom Dupuis. In this video, I’m going to show you how to choose focus keywords in Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. So, when you edit a page or post and scroll down, you’ll see the Yoast SEO box right here.

And the first step is to select a focus keyword, and the next step is to optimize the content. So, it’s actually a little trickier than it sounds. If you’ve done this before you’ve probably experienced this. You set your focus keyword, use it in all the right places, maybe use the page analysis and social tab to further optimize the content, make sure your content is really good, you publish the page, wait, wait, wait; and then you don’t rank high in Google and you’re wondering what you did wrong.

So, I will go over the gist of it, but if you want to stick with me throughout this whole video, I’m going to go over some little more advanced strategies to help you select better focus keywords and rank higher. So, I would definitely recommend creating a keyword list instead of just selecting these on a per page basis. By creating a keyword list you can understand what content is going to your site and your blog posts if you decide to research keywords for your blog posts. But, I’m going to do an example.

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You’ll want to go to google.com and if you’re creating a keyword list I would open up a Google doc or a related program so you can write those down, but I’m just going to use a Chicago photographer as an example. So, we’re a Chicago photographer and just type in “Chicago photographer” we can see that it shows up in Google right here- Chicago photographers. So we can add that to our list because if it shows up in Google autocomplete we can assume it’s been searched for. I’ll just do “Chicago photographer” we have headshots, wedding, and baby. We have portrait, family, and nanny.

And this is assuming these are all services that we actually offer. So now that we did the non-plural version and found all the most relevant phrases, we can do the plural version. So now we can see wedding, baby, family, and engagement, senior. We have wedding, baby, and family. We don’t have engagement; we have family, so I’ll just add senior to that. So, now we have both the plural and non-plural versions. The next thing we want to do is do a little “fill in the blank” trick. So we can see wedding, family (we have those), headshot, fashion, boudoir (I don’t know if that’s the right pronunciation).

The headshot, fashion, and boudoir. So we have headshot, we do not have fashion, and we do not have this weird word that I can’t pronounce. We do have engagement and wedding. So now we’ll do the non-plural version and see if there are any other ones that show up. We have baby and newborn, so those are pretty much the same keyword so we don’t want to include the same keyword over and over.

If you see a “Chicago wedding photographer” and “a wedding photographer in Chicago” those are essentially the same word, so only include one variation in your list. So we have nanny, maternity, and children’s. We have nanny, we do not have maternity, and we do not have children’s. All right. So now we can do the “fill in the blank” method here and see that we have professional but that’s an adjective, that’s not really anything to do with the type of service we offer so we don’t need to do that, but we can try “Blank (-) photographer in Chicago.” So we just want to try different variations of that phrase.

Professional, best, cheap, average cost of wedding photographer in Chicago- that might be a good blog article. So, we’ll go ahead and add that to our blog post keywords. And we can even do “Cost of photographer in Chicago.” Cost of wedding photographer in Chicago so would essentially be the same. So, you can get blog post keywords, but I think you get the gist of it.

Try out different plurals, different word ordering and using this “fill in the blank” right here and you can place it on any part of the phrase to have Google fill in the blank. And that’s how you ca get your keyword list going, but that won’t cover everything.

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So, you really want to be thorough and find out all the phrases that people are searching for. So, to do that go to Google keyword planner and you will have to sign up with an AdWords account to use this tool, but this will tell you the actual number of monthly searches people are searching for a particular keyword and it will tell you additional keyword suggestions.

Once you’ve signed up for AdWords, then go here and start with a broad phrase, probably your main keyword or whatever that is.

I’ll just do a Chicago photographer, and then in this “include” option- I want to do Chicago photographer. So, you always want to start with a broad phrase. If you get too specific, you won’t get many results. So now I’ll just click and get ideas. And I want to make sure I’m on this keyword ideas tab. So, for now, I just want to look at the keywords to see if I missed any. So, I’ll look here Chicago photographer has all these. I do not have “food”, I do not have “event”, or “commercial”.

So I’ll go here and add food, event, and commercial. “Architectural photographer” if I even do that. “Editorial photographer” I’m not going to go through this whole thing, but you get the idea. Just go into the keyword planner and you can use these filters right here to narrow down your results and you just want to scroll through these and make sure you didn’t miss any keywords.

You can use this to go to the next page. People are searching “Pet photographer” even. That will be our last one, I guess. So, once you do that, the last tool I want to go over is hub shout web grader and the main reason I use this is to get competitor ideas. So if you have some competitor websites out there, you can actually extract their full keyword list using this tool.

So, maybe you can just go to a few websites, open them up. Go to hub shout web grader and then go here and submit. So it will take a little bit to generate a report. I definitely would not use a music thing on your website, anyway. So, it’s going to generate a report and it’ll tell you three competitors’ keywords and you can get ideas from that. So, if you go here, you can enter up to four websites and click “submit.”

Once you do that, you can see a full keyword list and hub shout will tell you all the keywords this website ranks for up to four websites. So, then you just want to go back and do your keyword list and get any ideas from your competitors. So, that really is the first stage, is just build an extensive list of keywords and now we can just assume Chicago photographer, this would be Chicago headshot photographer, Chicago wedding photographer and so forth.
So the next step now that we know our focus keywords is to optimize the content for those phrases. So the first step in content optimization is to create a new page for each of these. You really don’t want to target multiple phrases on the same page because Google is all about relevancy. If someone Google’s “Chicago wedding photographer” they don’t want to read about “Chicago fashion photography.” So you really need to create a new page so you can do better keyword targeting.

So we’ll just do one for “Chicago wedding photographer.” Go ahead and create a new page- Chicago wedding photographer. We’ll do caps to make it look nice. And we’ll write all our content here, then we scroll down here. So, we’ll just set this focus keyword. I already used it in the article heading and page title.

So, by default Yoast will use this as my SEO title. So the SEO title is the title tag that appears in search engines and the URL and Meta description also appear there, but these are configured in your Yoast settings, so if you want to override those you can just write whatever you want. We’ll write a nice Meta description- “Tom Dupuis is a professional wedding photographer in Chicago “ and I would make this probably about 145 characters long, but don’t go over the limit or Yoast will tell you and it will get cut off by search engines.

So, you can see that I used “wedding photographer in Chicago” but Yoast does not pick it up because it’s not an exact match keyword. Yoast will only detect exact match keywords, so if you use a variation like I did in your Meta description or somewhere else, then don’t worry about it. it’s still there, you can just ignore the fact that it says “No.” So, the page URL- Chicago wedding photographer- that’s there. We’ll write our content- “Tom is a Chicago wedding photographer…

” So generally, my rule is to include the keyword two to three times in the content; once in the first one to three sentences and it doesn’t have to be an exact keyword match like I mentioned. Whatever sounds the best, whatever doesn’t sound spammy, you just want to make sure it reads well. There we go. So, I’ll just update this so Yoast can actually detect everything I’m doing. We’ll scroll down. So it says “Yes, yes, yes” in the Meta description “No” but it’s actually “Yes.”

So, there are a few other tips I want to go over. If you add an image to your page, then upload the image with the keyword as the file name. So, before you upload an image, name the file name as the keyword on your computer, then add media, then upload it to WordPress and use it on that page. So, by default, that file name will be used as the alternative text and that’s just a small ranking factor in Google, but you can click on an image and add it to your alternative text right here. So whatever you set that file name for the image, WordPress will automatically use that as the alternative text. But you want to make sure it accurately describes the image.
So, let’s look at this “Page analysis” tab right here. “There are six words contained in the content body. Far too low.” I agree. You should definitely add more content to it. “No images appear on this page” so we want to use a couple of images, maybe just one, but we also want to preferably use the alt text in the image as long as it accurately describes it.

“A Meta description has been specified, but does not contain the keyword.” It actually does. I already went over that. “Meta description is under 120 characters.” So you do want to make your Meta description, I would say about 140 to 150 characters preferably. And like I said, that is the part of the snippet that appears in Google. So this really is the forefront of your SEO.

Your SEO title and your URL and Meta description are what appear in the search engine snippet. “No outbound links appear on this page.” So, part of content optimization is using a couple of links on the page. You don’t have to do this, but it does help.