How can I tell if Yoast is helping my Site?

If you don’t know how to “measure its effect” the premium version wouldn’t do you any good – it’s obvious you’re out of your depth and it would be a monumental waste of time to explain to you why. The only way you’ll get an answer that “shows you the proof” is for you to spend a good 500 hours learning SEO so that you can understand what this plugin does and the “effect” it is having.

So what you are saying is, it is so complicated, it takes a master’s degree to understand it. Generally when people use the “It’s Too Complicated to explain” excuse, they are hiding behind a smoke screen. I don’t need to be an SEO engineer to see if Yoast is improving my websites position. That is just your way of trying to duck the question and place the burden on me to prove your pulgin works. This dodging technique has a name. It is called: “Shifting the Burden of Proof”.

I asked you to proving evidence that the plugin is helping, and all you did is shift the burden of providing proof on to me. The Shifting the burden of proof technique is only employed by those who do not have an answer. So, it is quite clear from your response that there is no way for you to show proof that Yoast actually improves a site’s position and you are afraid that this will be discovered and people find out that there is not tangible way for you to provide evidence of Yoast effectiveness. Of course you are welcome to prove me wrong here, but if you try to use the cheap tactic of shifting the burden of proof on to me again, it will only prove I am right.

It’s not shifting the burden of proof – it’s facts. I can’t teach you in a day everything I’ve personally learned in years for you to perform the deep analysis required to have “proof”.

As a simple test of proof you can use yoast’s sitemap feature to generate a sitemap – then submit that to Google Webmaster Tools Search Console – you’ll see Google accept the sitemap and use it in its crawling efforts.

You can also edit your meta tags on your pages (page titles/descriptions) and after a month or two (enough time for Google to crawl the updated pages and update its index) you should be able to search for your site/page in Google and see the updated meta tags in your listing.

You can also turn on the open graph/social media/twitter card stuff in the social media section and then go to a social media site like Facebook – if you tried sharing your site before turning these features on you’d see a plain link in your post – sharing the same site/page after turning on the features you’d get a much better link with a featured image and that page’s meta tag info (page title/description).

Like most plugins this one works great “out of the box” with basic settings – to get more out of it you have to do a lot of fine tuning – you won’t get instant traffic with this plugin, you’ll get “better seo” – so instead of a page ranking in google for the WordPress default page title/description (which will have less “optimized/targeted” keywords than if you set these yourself) you can have it ranked for keywords you think will perform better – the seo box in the edit-page area helps that even more with the suggestions (like adding more words to the page, adding alt-text to images, etc) – the whole point of the plugin being that it *helps* guide you to building a page that will rank far better in google search than if the plugin wasn’t used.

So lets look at your homepage for example, right now here is how your homepage shows on Google:

The Jungle Explorer. Independent Rugged Individualist
https://thejungleexplorer.com/
The Jungle Explorer. Welcome to my site. This site is about me, The Jungle Explorer. Why do I call myself, The Jungle Explorer, when my site is not about exploring jungles? You know, that is a good question! No, the real reason is because I spent over 20 years of my life traveling around the world doing exploration work in ...

Using the plugin you can change that to get better keywords and a more appealing listing on google, I would change the title/description to:

The Jungle Explorer. Independent Rugged Individualist
https://thejungleexplorer.com/
I am the Jungle Explorer. Check out my videos about DIY, wilderness survival, hunting and more. Learn valuable self reliance and survival techniques to become more independent.

The difference there is I’ve changed the description to “sell” the site to the person at google reading site description – and I’ve included several keywords to help better rank the page for the keywords that describe your site. In the current description it mentions “the jungle explorer” 3 times, so unless you plan on getting most your traffic from people searching “the jungle explorer” and not other keywords like “survival, independence, diy, wilderness” it’s not very “optimal” – using yoast you can edit the meta info for the page and using it’s different suggestions come up with a keyword rich and perfect-sized title/description – which will eventually translate into more traffic.

The proof that the plugin works is in the google search index, when you edit a pages meta tags for title/description and it ends up getting indexed as such on Google – then you know the plugin is working. Are title/descriptions the main selling points to the plugin? No, it does a lot more than meta tags – but that’s one example (and a powerful part of the overall seo picture) – using not only the meta tag editor but the sitemap generator and the social media section and the page seo suggestions you can more easily craft an “optimized” page that search engines will like much better than if you didn’t use the plugin and heed its suggestions.

The pro version doesn’t offer enough features to justify buying – though when you get into >500k visitors/month it will have some features worth paying the price for – but for a smaller less busy site the only thing the premium version has that’s worth using is the redirects feature, but you can just install another free plugin like “Redirection” to handle that job (its free and works great).

So there you go, the tangible proof that it’s “working” – though it will ‘work’ a lot better with human input, most of its advantage over not using anything at all is that it makes editing different settings a lot easier and customizable per page versus simply adding these settings in your theme template – which work on a sitewide basis versus being customized/optimized per page.

If your end-goal is to get a bigger audience/more traffic – you’re at least on the right track optimizing for search engines, you just won’t get a payoff anytime soon this way – your best bet for immediate traffic would be to push your social media accounts (if you have a lot of pictures you might consider adding pinterest – they famously drive a ton of traffic to sites) – you might also consider turning on the “blog” portion of your site so you can get new content added to your site regularly (and more easily) – like your homepage says you want to share your experience/knowledge – you can do that with posts by writing articles about stuff, getting you new content that google likes and adding more keywords to your site – then sharing those new articles on your social media platforms. Yeah I saw on your other posts about how you dont have a “blog” you have a “website” – it can be both.

Thank you for all that helpful information. I appreciate you taking the time to try to explain this to me.

My goal is to rank better in the google search results. My site, “www.thejungleexplorer.com” does not even show up in the first ten pages on a google search. My site’s title is, “The Jungle Explorer” and even when I use when I do a search in quotes, my site does not show up. My home page Focus Keyword is “The Jungle Explorer” for crying out loud and it does not even show up.

Here is what I do not understand. I built a website back around 2003 with Frontpage 2003. It has no SEO at all. Zip, Zilch, Nada. Back then you just used some meta keywords and that was it. That site is number 1 on google when you search for it by title name. That site is so old and outdated it is not even funny and it ranks really high with google and most of the media ranks very high as well.

I have worked my butt off using yoast to tweak my new site and it does not even show us. Yes, it is list with google. If I type in the URL it shows up just fine, but that is about the only way I can find it in the google index. I have a photo gallery on my new site and I have filled out every single piece of metadata about every picture and I know for a fact that they are in the google index, but I laterlly have to do an Image Search to find them. The photos from my old site that have no metadata and don’t even have related file names show up high in the google image index.

Now, I know I have a lot to learn and I won’t deny it, but I don’t get this. I have spent months building a new modern “Responsive” site with WP and tweaking the crap out of the SEO and my site is nowhere to be found, but my old crappy out dated site is at the top. How can that be?

Yes, I have done all the Open Graph work for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Even custom created share images. I have linked Facebook and Twitter to the site as well.

When I said that I wanted a way to measure if using Yoast is helping. All I meant is that I need a way to measure where my site is at in google results based on keywords. Take the title for instance. Is there a tool where I can enter the title of the site and the main url and have that tool tell me what number my site shows up under that search. I am not talking about something real complicated? Just something simple. Say it turns up today at number 320 in the search results. At least I would know where it is at and then I could track if it is going up in the result over time as I improve the seo.

Yeah lots have changed in 14 years lol, the thing your other site has that your new one doesn’t (and it’s a big thing) is AGE. The older a domain is the more “authority” it gets – the more “trust” it gets… If you have a site that old it doesn’t matter if it’s mobile friendly or has any advanced seo setup or not – it will just naturally *do better* in search results for its keywords. Now if the old site had a competitor start a new website with similar content – that competitor could do all the advanced seo in the world and still not catch up to your old site – it would take at least a couple years for the competitor to catch up (barring anything that breaks google like a super viral article/video or maybe the competitor got tweeted by Trump, etc). So you can’t compare such an old domain against a new one, whether they are in a similar niche or not – a well aged domain is just going to do good.

So for your new domain – you want to get high search engine rank position – that will take time (or again, a crazy unnatural thing that pours a ton of traffic to your site). I build a lot of business websites – lawyers pizza joints construction companies/etc – and they always want #1 in google, it’s hard but I generally get them there by 12-16 months – once their domain has aged enough that the hard work done in optimizing their site pays off with increased rank. If you watch your ranks for certain phreases (eg, the jungle explorer) you’ll see your rank slowly climb its way up month to month. With a highly optimized site you might move up the ranks by 3-4 positions/month, without any seo work you might only rise up the ranks 1-2 positions (or less).

So that’s pretty much the value of doing the work you’re doing – moving up search engine ranks faster than if you didn’t do the work – and this will apply to all relevant keywords/search phrases – it will just take time (concentrating on specific keywords/phrases helps speed this process up). You can stack keywords too – for example when I do a local small business site sometimes I’ll stack keywords when it’s important for the business owner to rank quickly and better than their competitors so for a burger joint I might do this:
domain name: seattlebobsburgers.com
homepage title: bobs burgers seattle
homepage description: bobs burgers in seattle washington serving up the tastiest burgers in town, etcetcetc…
Homepage content would then contain reiterations of those keywords “burger/seattle” – as long as the text/image content on that homepage are proper sentences/paragraphs and not just keyword spam this page will rank really well for any search phrases containing “burgers” – and the searcher wouldn’t even need to put “seattle” since google already knows where they live – so some guy in seattle might search “tasty burgers” and google would pull up its index of local “tasty burgers” in seattle (knowing he’s there and probably looking for local burgers) – this is where the keyword stacking comes in and gives this site an edge over competitors that might not be optimized. It’s important to note using too much of the keyword could be seen as “keyword stuffing/spamming” – so its important to write carefully when doing this – usually keyword usage on a webpage should be kept around 3-5% – that’s why I’ll have added the keywords to the meta tags and domain name – no penalties stuffing keywords there, you can also stuff keywords in image alt tags freely as well.

This is an easy tool that you said you’re looking for:
serps.com/tools/rank-checker/

When I put your website and search “the jungle explorer” it shows the site ranked in 59th place – not too shabby for a 2 month old website, but then again there are next to 0 worldwide searches for that phrase monthly – and broadening it to “jungle explorer” doesn’t put your domain close enough to the front to even get picked up on the serp checker (i think they only scan the first 500 results).

You shouldn’t be too let down by poor rankings, a 2 month old domain is not going to rank good, that’s just the way it is – but doing this much work now *will* pay off down the road. You can add extra years to your domain’s registration to help gain more trust as well (almost forgot about that) – yes search engines won’t trust a brand new site too much – but search engines will see the length of time it has been registered for and will trust your domain more in these early months if it has been registered for 5 years versus only being registered 1 year – it tells the search engines that the domain owner has enough confidence in the site to add so many years because the owner intends for the site+content to stick around a good long while (search engines like reliability – hence old domains are reliable – as is regularly updated/new content – reliable).

If you’re interested in optimizing more here is more tools I like:
gtmetrix.com – lots of good technical optimization tips
toolbox.seositecheckup.com – a good seo scanner, you can sign up for 15 day free trial to get scans/reports, and you can keep re-registering for new trial accounts as much as you want (with new email accounts to signup – I use a catchall mailbox so i can create new accounts there easily without creating any new mailboxes, lol)

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Thane.

Wow! Now that was REALLY Helpful. I mean that. Thank you so much! Sorry for the delay in responding I was out of the country on vacation in Costa Rica.

Everything you said made perfect sense and really helped me to understand things that I did not get. I have read a lot and the information I have read said that older outdated sites were being pushed down in the index in favor of newer, modern, platform responsive sites (Smartphone, Tablet, PC). I have even read that Google would delete old html 1 and 2 sites.

I thought by creating a new modern responsive site, I would go up fast in the rankings. I am not looking for #1 as I know billion dollar companies are all shooting for those spots, but I would at least like to be able to type the exact name of my site in and see it pop up at least on the first few pages.

I now know that it will take many months to see some progress and this helps me to have more realistic expectations. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me understand this.

There a few things I would like to ask you as you seem to be extremely knowledgeable. I used WordPress to build my site, and I admit, I don’t really understand the inner workings of it. It makes nice looking websites, but I am used to being able to look at the guts of a page (code) and see what is going on and I can’t do this with WP.

One of my techniques of generating traffic to my old site was through images. I am an armature photographer and becasue I travel a lot I get to take nature photos from all over the world. I created a photo gallery on my old site to bring people to my old site that were looking for free photos. This technique worked wonderfully and generated thousands of hits a month. (People love free stuff) My old photo gallery was very simple and created manually using tables and thumbnails which opened each picture in a new window.

But with my new site built with WP and using the Photo Gallery plugin (by Photo Gallery Team), I am not seeing any traffic at all. Not even one visitor entering my site via my photo gallery. Now I know that the photos are indexed because I can do a Google images search for them and see they are Google’s index, but I cannot find them any other way. I can typing their exact title in quotes and they do not show up in the index at all. Not under their title, tags, description or file name can they be found in the google index.

Now my first thought here is that the Plugin I am using is not presenting the information to the google spider in a way that it can index it with the associated picture. Can you offer me any advice on this?

Thanks again for your most appreciated help.