[00:00:31] I love being able to find the rhythm of a new school year, especially the challenge of coming up with systems that make life easier as we navigate new extracurricular activities, homework routines, and all of that other fun stuff. Looking at this from the blogging angle, I know there are systems and tools that we've put in place to make our lives a bit easier as well.
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[00:01:32] i'm going to focus on Yoast with most of my terminology, but the tips that I'm sharing are applicable no matter what SEO plugin you use. For this week's episode, we're going to start with the search appearance section of Yoast. So when you're writing a new blog post, scroll to the very bottom, you'll see the Yoast features in all their glory.
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[00:02:17] First up is the SEO title. Now, this isn't the title that shows up at the top of your blog post that you fill in before you start writing the text. That is your post title. So instead, the SEO title is what actually shows up in Google search results when that particular URL is ranking. The SEO title is what shows up.
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[00:03:06] These are called snippet variables, and they are just a shortcut that Yoast provides to make it easier for you to adjust your SEO title. Let's say that your blog post title is a little bit long. You could decide to take off the name of your site from the SEO title, and you would just delete that little gray box that says site title.
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[00:04:04] But you might decide to use a separate post title and SEO title if, let's say you're doing a series of some kind. So you might want the title at the top of the blog post to show that it's part of a series, but you don't think that that's going to be a very clickable title in search results. And so that's an example of when it might be worth it to adjust your SEO title a little bit.
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[00:04:56] but I know that it makes it a little bit less clickable in Google search results. And so once I start actually blogging for this business a little bit more, I'm gonna go back in and adjust my SEO titles to something a little more clickable. Now, moving on to the next field in the Yoast search appearance section, we have a spot where you can adjust the slug.
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[00:05:43] So it's essentially just adding dashes between the words in your title. Let's say you write a post that's titled 10 Engaging Morning Work Ideas for First Grade, the slug would be automatically generated as www.yourblogname.com/ten-engaging-morning-work you get the idea it's really long and you want your slug to include your focus keyword, and that's about it.
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[00:06:45] And again, as one last reminder, this is something that you can take care of in your blog post settings, just off to the right, those menus on the right hand side. You don't have to take care of it in the Yoast plugin, but like I said, it is a helpful reminder that it's in there and the plugin. So when you're going through the different Yoast things before you hit publish, it just reminds you that you want to adjust your slug before you schedule that post to go live.
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[00:07:41] It gives you a little idea of what the post is about before you click on it. And I think it's underrated because a lot of people just kind of phone it in when they're filling in the meta description or they skip it completely and they're fine with just letting some random snippet get chosen. Or they might just write a basic sentence with the target keyword 'cause they know that's important and then they move on.
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[00:08:32] And the reason you can worry too much about your meta description is the simple fact that Google doesn't have to choose that snippet of text to show in search results. I would say most of the time Google picks whatever they want from the page in order to support user intent. But it's still important to fill it in because the meta description does give Google good information about your post, and you are showing Google what you think is important in that piece of content.
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[00:09:34] But what you do not ever want to do is leave it blank. So to sum it up, it's important to check in on the search appearance section of Yoast. When you're writing your post, scroll on down to that first section and take a look. None of these boxes are going to completely make or break the SEO of your blog post, but it's helpful to think about what your posts are going to look like in search results, because at the end of the day, you want your blog post to stand out on Google and encourage people to click and read more.
