It does not matter if your website is about a mobile jackpot casino, a plumbing company, or an online store, the one thing that most websites have in common is a part of the website that has a blog.
The purpose of the blog is simple. It is used to convey information to future and current customers are either the company’s own products, news about their industry, or information about their competitors (why our product is better than the competitor’s).
For most companies, WordPress is the easiest and most popular blogging software to use. There are other content management systems on the market, but for most companies that want to create a small company blog with just a few writers, WordPress is the go to product.
But anything involving communication through your website, involves people being able to find your website, and that involved SEO optimization (Search Engine Optimization).
“Can’t I just buy a bunch of banner ads, you know, the digital version of newspaper ads, and be done with it.”
Digital banner ads and traditional newspaper ads serve a different purpose than SEO associated with your website pages and blog articles. If you do your SEO correctly, you may not even have to go down the banner ad route. But as with most rules in life, there is no one size fits all, and you may find niche websites that are a perfect match to go with your products, and banner ads will be the right choice.
Even if you get the person to click on your website, you still need to get them to convert from a click to an action that will lead to a purchase. But is going beyond the scope of this article. For now, let’s just stick with SEO and a review of Math Rank SEO and Yoast SEO.
For these reviews, I am going to focus on what is offered free. Both of these products have items that a person can pay for, but you will have to decide when your website is large enough to be worth investing in either one or both of these products.
Math Rank SEO for WordPress
Math Rank SEO is lesser know of these two products.
General Preview
Get a preview of Googe search results for both a desktop and a mobile device. Click on the icon on the right to switch between the two.
If you click “edit snippet” you can modify the Title, permalink, and the description. When I first tried this, my website name was displayed first and it cut off part of the title of my article.
Actually, the Math Rank SEO plugin is out of date in this area. First, they do not show the featured image, which if you have it, Google will display it. Second, it shows my title cut off when the title can be 78 characters.
Considering how important mobile searches, that is a big problem. Your page rank is based on how well your mobile website performs. If your desktop website is great, but your mobile website is horrible, that will hurt your Google ranking.
Focus Keywords
Math Rank SEO allows you to add up to 5 keywords to base your article on. Yoast SEO only allows 1 in the free version, but you can add more if you pay.
Pillar Content
This would be used for a category page. If one of your categories is “Apple Juice”, the main page for “Apple Juice” would have this tag selected. You would probably want to have links to all of your other pages that are related to “Apple Juice” — “History of Apple Juice”, “Different Types of Apple Juice”, “How to substitute apple juice for other liquids in recipes”. You get the idea.
Basic SEO
Each of these items will turn green when you have “passed” the test.
- Hurray! Your focus keyword is in your article title.
- Focus keyword is used inside the SEO Meta Description.
- Focus keyword is used in the URL (Note: many people now believe that this is not as important as it used to be)
- Focus keyword is within the first 10% of the content
- Focus keyword is found in the content.
- Content is X words long. Consider at least 600 words.
Additional
- Focus keywords found in subheadings
- Focus keywords found in the alt text
- Keyword density is X, the focus keyword and combination appear Y times.
- URL is X characters long. Consider shortening it.
- Great! You are linking to external resources.
- At least one external link with DoFollow found.
- You are linking to other resources within your own website.
- We are searching the database (Note: no idea what this is referring to)
Title Readability
- Focus keywords at the beginning of the SEO title
- Your title has a positive or negative sentiment
- Your title does not contain one keyword. Consider adding it.
- Your SEO title does not contain a number. (Note: this does not apply to all types of articles)
Content Readability
- Use the table of contents to break down content (Note: Different people have different views on the helpfulness of a table of contents in articles)
- You are using short paragraphs.
- Your content contains images or videos (Note: Failed to see the featured image as an image. Some themes display the featured image in the article while others do not.)
Advanced
Nothing here seems to stick out except you can choose to display or not display your SEO code on the front page of your blog post. If the value is good, you may want to display it, but if it is not, you would not.
Schema
Not all available schemas are listed within the category of “Article”. It only allows “Blog Post”, “Article”, and “News Article” to be chosen. But the actual schema specification allows 20 different ones.
Social
See how your post will look in Twitter and Facebook.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is considered the “mature” product.
SEO Focus Phrase
The free version only allows one focus phrase. The pro version allows more than one focus phrase to be added.
Preview
See how your website will appear in Google search results on both mobile and desktop. Yoast SEO seems to be up to date with this. The full lines are displayed and the image is shown in the mobile version.
Even though what is displayed is correct, Yoast SEO says that it is too long. My title length is below 78 characters, but Yoast SEO still says that it is too long.
Meta Description
Yoast SEO does not automatically copy the Excerpt to the Meta Description.
Analysis
- SEO title width
- Outbound links
- Internal links
- Keyphrase in the introduction (first paragraph)
- Keyphrase length
- Keyphrase density
- Keyphrase in the meta description
- Meta description length
- Previously used keywords (checks against other articles)
- Keyphrase in subheadings
- Image alt attributes
- Text length (Yoast SEO says more than 300 is good, while Math Rank SEO says more than 600 words is good)
- Keyphrase in title
- Keyphrase in the slug (URL)
Related Keyphrases
This is a premium feature.
Cornerstone Content
This is called “Pillar Content” in the Math Rank SEO application.
Readability
- Flesch Reading Ease
- Transition words
- Passive voice
- Consecutive sentences, varying sentence length
- Subheading distribution
- Paragraph length
- Sentence length
Schema
Although there are more options than in Math Rank SEO, Yoast SEO still does not contain the full range of different types of Schemas for articles.
Social Media
With the pro version, you can see how your post will look in social media postings.
What are all of the different types of Schemas for articles?
Since both Yoast SEO and Math Rank SEO do not include all of the available article tags, here is the complete list:
- Article
- Advertiser content article
- News article
- Analysis news article
- Ask Public News Article
- Background News Article
- Opinion News Article
- Reportage News Article
- Review News Article
- Report
- Satirical Article
- Scholarly Article
- Medical Scholarly Article
- Social Media Posting
- Blog Posting
- Live Blog Posting (eg. Fox News did a Live Blog Posting for last night’s debate between Biden and Trump in real-time, the blog post was constantly changing as the event was happening in real-time.)
- Discussion Forum Posting
- Tech Article
- API Reference
Summary
If I had to choose one or the other, at this point, I would choose Yoast SEO over Math Rank SEO, because the preview display for the Google Search results for mobile is not correct and gives incorrect feedback.
But since both are free, I would install both and use both, each for what it is better in.
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