WordPress SEO basics sound intimidating until you realize Yoast is really just checking for a handful of specific things, every single time. Once you know what they are, filling them in correctly takes a couple of minutes per post, not an afternoon.
Focus Keyphrase: The Foundation
Everything else Yoast checks gets measured against your focus keyphrase, the specific phrase you want that post to rank for. Yoast checks whether it appears in your title, your intro, your subheadings, your slug, and your image alt text. In other words, one phrase, checked consistently across the whole post.
SEO Title and Meta Description
Your SEO title can differ slightly from your headline, but it needs to include the focus keyphrase, ideally near the front. Your meta description is the short summary shown in search results. It should include the keyphrase too, and stay short enough that search engines don’t cut it off.
Structure: Headings, Links, and Images
Beyond the keyphrase itself, Yoast also checks the structural basics: exactly one H1 per post, subheadings that break up long sections, internal links to related content on your own site, and outbound links to relevant external sources. According to Google’s own SEO guidance, clear structure and genuinely useful links are part of what search engines look for, not just an arbitrary checklist.
Images matter too. Every image needs alt text, ideally including the keyphrase, both for accessibility and because search engines can’t “see” an image without it.
Readability: Sentences and Transitions
The last piece of WordPress SEO basics isn’t really about search engines at all; it’s about whether a human can actually read your post easily. Yoast checks sentence length, flags when too many sentences run long, and checks whether you’re using transition words like “however” or “for example” to connect ideas smoothly.
Putting It Together
None of these checks are complicated on their own. The challenge is remembering all of them, every time, for every post. If you’d rather have this handled automatically, PostCrab fills in these fields for you on every WordPress post it publishes. See how WordPress SEO publishing works, or read the step-by-step guide to connect WordPress to PostCrab if you haven’t set it up yet.