Yoast SEO is on everyone’s must-have plugins list for a good reason. It’s one of the most helpful and easy to use plugins out there. But not everyone understands its purpose and they often put too much emphasis on Yoast’s suggestions.

Don’t forget that as powerful a plugin as Yoast is, it’s still not a human and will not see your content the way a human visitor would.

Let’s look at what Yoast SEO does and a few of its suggestions you can ignore:

What is Yoast Seo?

Yoast is basically a checklist of things you can do to optimize your blog’s posts and pages for your chosen keyword. By doing the things Yoast suggests, you will improve your chances of ranking for those keywords.

Yoast bases its suggestions on Google’s algorithm and they keep it updated as Google makes changes.

With Yoast, it’s easy to add meta descriptions to your posts and pages. I remember the days of manually adding these to each page of my website with HTML. Now we don’t have to do that!

Yoast will also automatically generate your XML sitemap which makes it easier to submit them to search engines. This helps search engines find your pages faster.

Yoast also alerts you if you’ve used your keyword before in another blog post. This will keep you from having pages and posts competing against each other to rank in search engines.

These are just a few of the things that Yoast does that makes Search Engine Optimization easier!

But that doesn’t mean that green light we strive for is the end all be all. It’s not. Remember what I said above, Yoast isn’t human so you need to take its suggestions with a grain of salt.

Yoast Alerts You Can Ignore

I’ve seen a lot of people stress themselves out trying to get that coveted green light from Yoast SEO. It’s not worth it! Really look at the suggestions the plugin is making and see if they make sense for your post. Here are a few suggestions you can ignore if you choose to:

Headings Alert in Readability

Headings are important for your readers. They make it easier to scan your posts and they help make your posts more accessible.

But I don’t think that every post needs headings especially if you’ve written a short post* or an essay style post.

Yoast will give you a red light though if you don’t include them. Should you force them into your writing just to get a green light from Yoast? Nope!

Always consider the purpose of your post when formatting it. The most important thing is to write for your reader and if headings make the post unnatural leave them out.

You’ll also get an alert if you write more than three hundred words without a heading. If you’ve edited your work and already cut out the unnecessary and repetitive parts, just ignore this alert.

*Note: Longer posts are better for SEO as search engines consider these to be more valuable to readers. Again though consider your purpose, and write for your reader. Don’t fluff out a post just to reach a certain word count. 

Three Sentences Start With The Same Word

Have you ever had three consecutive sentences that start with the same word? If so, this will get you a red light from Yoast.

The purpose is to keep you from being repetitive in your writing. But maybe you wrote those sentences like that for a reason. By changing them, will you lose some of the impact those sentences bring to the story you’re telling? Should you change them to get a green light? No. Don’t make changes that could take the meaning out of your writing.

Move Your Keyword to the Beginning of Your Title

Before you do that, ask yourself if your title would still make sense if you moved the keyword to the beginning? Is it still as catchy? If not leave it alone. You don’t want a title that sounds odd to your readers.

Image Alt Attributes

It’s good practice to add keywords to your image alt tags. If you’re putting your keywords in your featured image and you’re adding that image via the “Set featured image” section, Yoast might not pick up on them. Which means a red light even though you did the right thing. Don’t worry about it!

Sentences and Paragraphs are Too Long

It’s common knowledge that when writing for the web short paragraphs are best. But I’ve visited blogs where the paragraphs were one or two sentences each and all the sentences were short. They were hard for me to read. There was no flow! I had to wonder if they had taken Yoast’s suggestions too far.

Your writing needs to flow. Don’t damage that flow just to satisfy Yoast.

Next time you write a blog post, really look at all of the Yoast SEO suggestions and ask yourself if they are really necessary to change. It’s nice to get those green lights but if you don’t, don’t worry about. Just remember those red and green lights are suggestions for your benefit. They don’t affect your search engine rankings.

Instead, always keep your human readers in mind when you write blog posts and you’ll be creating the kind of content Google loves to rank.

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