A couple months back, I signed up to be a beta tester for a new WordPress Plugin being developed by a friend of mine.
I’ve been a blogger for a decade and I even teach this stuff. All of my sites are self-hosted WordPress, which means I get to customize them to my heart’s delight. But it also means I sometimes have no idea what I’m doing.
I consider myself to be pretty smart in the ways of WordPress, but I’m definitely not an expert.
Like any other blogger, I install plugins on my site to make it better, more marketable, faster, or to get more subscriptions. There are several plugins I can’t live without, and have had on my site from day 1.
One of those plugins is Yoast. Yoast is an SEO plugin that helps you to create SEO-optimzed posts that will (hopefully) have a better ranking when people search for those keywords.
This plugin has been one of my go-tos, but I’ve recently disabled it in favour of Duane’s new plugin, Elevate SEO.
There’s much to love about this plugin. First off, it’s really, really simple. Even someone like me, who is not the smartest smartie can install it via plugin installations, and then when you launch it, it walks you through the process of creating a site map for Google, making sure Google Analytics is installed, and other things, that… let’s be honest, you always meant to do, but never quite got around to (or wasn’t sure exactly how to do them).
The dashboard then gives you a live view of the SEO issues on your site, like how fast it’s loading and how many times your site has shown up in search results.
You may still want to keep Yoast around for helping you to increase your search engine optimization on individual posts. But in terms of making sure everything that you need to do to, SEO-wise, for your entire site is done, Elevate SEO does is simply and quite elegantly.
I’m liking it a lot so far. If you want to try it as well, it’s free and available now to install on your site. Check it out!