The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 44: Aug/Sept 2019 | Page 30

TECHNOLOGY Boson Web’s Guide to using Wordpress Plugin – Yoast Why do you need Yoast? For most websites, Google is the most important source of visitors. No matter how important social networks can be, SEO is often the most important factor for a site’s growth. SMARTER MEDIA GROWS ITS TEAM Charlotte Curtis has joined the team at one of Swindon’s leading digital marketing agencies Smarter Media. Charlotte, who’s 31 and lives in Rodbourne Cheney has just joined the company as a digital campaign coordinator after a 15-year career as a legal secretary in a Swindon law firm. “I wanted a new challenge,” Charlotte said. “I thoroughly enjoyed working with my colleagues in the law firm and became a go-to person for many things. When this opportunity came up to learn new skills and become more engaged with digital marketing I had to take it. “I have to say I’m loving it. Every day is different, I’m getting to know the customers and for many I’m the person co-ordinating their activity with us and I’m their first point of contact.” Charlotte’s decision to join Smarter Media is ensuring that the success of this growing company has a real family feel. The managing director Karl Paul, is her partner and the operations director Robert Curtis is her brother. “Family is important to us and we want our team to have that family feel,” Robert Curtis said. “We care about all team members and our clients. At work, we are all one big family.” Charlotte, a former student of the former Hreod School in Swindon, lives with Karl and their three daughters Erin, seven, Libby, six and Cora, aged four. Smarter Media is a growing digital agency which works with companies large and small throughout the South West including Amaroc, Excalibur and Moovahome. The team offer services including social media marketing, SEO (Search Engine 30 THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2019 Optimisation), Digital Sales Funnels, and Paid Media. Karl Paul, managing director, said, “Being found and being visible online is critical for any business now – and it will become more critical over time. We focus on delivering measurable campaigns to promote a product or service to the right people at the right time in the right place. Helping our clients to grow by positioning them to attract quality customers.” One client Ashley Cain, of Moovahome, has been working with the team for some time. “We engaged with Smarter Media to help us gain more clients and move up the Google rankings. Within a few months our standing had improved and we had grown our client base by nine per cent. As a company trading for 14 years this is exceptional.” For more information visit: www.smarter-media.co.uk or call 01793 292171 or email [email protected] The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular SEO plugins used on the WordPress platform. It incorporates everything from a snippet editor to a real- time page analysis functionality that helps you optimise your page content, images titles and meta-descriptions. Yoast conscientiously follows all the SEO news and makes sure that the plugin is adapted to any changes in SEO techniques. The plugin ranks the SEO data you have added and provides guidance where needed. Yoast will provide a list of recommendations for your content to improve its performance in relation to your keywords. HOW DOES YOAST WORK? If you need Wordpress support or a new website let’s chat: 01225 309690 or [email protected] Yoast essentially simplifies and streamlines the main SEO processes to help ensure that the content you are uploading via WordPress is working as hard as it can to drive traffic to your site. Yoast will give you guidance on whether your titles are good or poor and make it easy to create unique meta-descriptions for your page. There is a useful feature on Yoast called Focus Keyword. This allows you to add your target keywords for Yoast to analyse. More information about Yoast can be found here: www.yoa.st/focus-keyword