Learning Some SEO Strategy ('Yoast SEO' review)

To be quite honest, I'm still learning the ropes of SEO. Digital marketing is the next level in my entrepreneurial journey, another slow process of getting my brand out there. Some might even cringe at the term "digital marketing" for all its bad rap. It probably sounds like spam. As you all know, I don't really have a conventional office at the moment, so the website is purely my bread and butter. Gone are the days of handing out flyers or throwing pamphlets in people’s homes or when everything used to be on papers, newspapers, billboards etc. I'm not going to wait in an office for anyone to walk in and buy my service, though that still sounds like spontaneously building a human connection. However, it's being just like everyone else in this town, selling air on the street. The idea is to sell something else to the world wide web.

At the moment, I don't have a big marketing budget for social media ads or Google AdWords yet so I'm just going to rely on writing quality content. I installed this popular Wordpress plugin called "Yoast SEO" and so far it seems like a neat feature for starters. Honestly, writing SEO content is quite a challenge for me as I'm used to writing freely or whatever comes into mind, a.k.a. Steemit Blogging. Here on Steemit, I'm not bound by SEO rules or keywords. I'm just supposed to write my thoughts. With "Yoast SEO", I will be reminded of all those SEO rules and stuff. Mind you, it can be quite controlling. Without any knowledge of SEO, I end up becoming dependent on Yoast SEO's Greenlight system. Basically, it tells me what to do. Yoast has this green light feature or what they call the "Content Analysis Tool". This notifies you if the article you write is 'SEO good' enough. On the right side is the readability score and guess what? It analyzes your content for readability. This feature is based on their pre-configured algorithm and so-called 'Flesch reading' ease test. I actually didn't know that my articles are not readable enough.

I'm wary of stuffing an article with keywords or composing super awkward sentences that make the content sound unnatural. Yoast lets you focus on one keyword but it does not take into account the plurals, synonyms or rearranged words. Those variations still help optimize my content for the focus keyword. And of course, Google knows when something is trying to do the trick. Google always knows!

The problem with the green light system is that I actually start obsessing about making everything perfect and I can't seem to just focus on just writing good content. This tool only fired up my obsessive-compulsiveness once again. I've been blogging for Steemit for more than a year now, so I'm not used to oversimplifying content and inserting keywords. I know it is great to check on my mistakes, however, the readability score does not feel accurate at times. It says I write too many words in a sentence, a big % of my article is in the passive voice or that I need more transition words and all that.

I think that the Yoast SEO plugin is an easy SEO tool which is great for SEO beginners. Solopreneurs will find this tool helpful especially when editing meta tags and optimizing content. It's good because it's free unless I want some more features.

To Yoast or not to Yoast? I think it's a helpful tool for SEO newbies like me but it's not the end-all-be-all of SEO tools. I don't need to get carried away with all that hype. I'm not a fan of oversimplification either. I'm not going to change the tone of my content just for the green light. It's just good that I'm learning more. The more I research, the more I find out how much I don't know about SEO.

In the end, I just want to sound natural even when I'm promoting online. I still want to be myself even when I'm writing marketing articles. I think people will come to my website for my unique approach just like what I'm doing for Steemit. Right now, I just want to focus all my energy on writing engaging content that can be read by human beings out there, no if's, and's or but's, even if Yoast says so.

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