It’s storm season out here in Texas, which means tornadoes. April and May in Tornado Alley mean keeping an eye on the sky and an ear to the radio … most of the time we get out without much damage, but you don’t want this to be the year you miss something.
That being said, regardless of the weather danger, we’re still here plugging away at the platform, adding and updating features. Morale is high in Q2 as we’ve managed to knock out several important updates in the first part of the year, and we’re looking forward to what’s coming.
Springtime is the right time to start preparing for your fall and winter selling, and we’ve got something coming to help with that … stay tuned. In the meantime, let’s get into the State of the Platform.
Rainmaker Platform Update 3.5.1
Our latest update added FluentSMTP, a powerful new native part of Rainmaker Platform that gives you significantly more control of your system and notification emails. You get better visibility of your emails, easy testing, and a simple interface that allows you to check status for every system email.
FluentSMTP requires a small amount of manual setup. If you wish to add this functionality to your site, please reach out to Support and we’ll get you started.
Embrace the Fundamentals with Yoast SEO
Rainmaker Platform is integrally tied to Yoast SEO. It’s a critical piece of our SEO puzzle, offering tons of functionality in an easy-to-use package. You’ll notice on your posts, pages and other area of your site, there is a pane with Yoast SEO options:
This pane is critical to making sure your content displays the way it should for third parties like Google and social media sites.
Ignore the YoastSMTP pane and you leave it entirely in the hands of these third-party sites for how they should display your content. That’s not something you want to do. Understanding how to use these settings gives you an easy way to control the first impression people get when they see you on Google, Facebook or another third-party site.
In addition, some aspects, like your slug, SEO title and schema, are important for letting search engines know what kind of page this is and what it’s about. Search engines are good at context clues, but getting specific takes the guesswork out.
These are fundamentals, but essential to keeping your site running smoothly and making your content more visible. Let’s go through how you can use the Yoast SEO panel on your posts and pages to nail down the fundamentals.
The SEO Tab
This is the first tab you’ll see.
There are a lot of details here, but we can break them down into three major categories:
- Display options for the browser and search engines.
- Analysis tools
- Page attributes
Display options
First come the display options, the bulk of these settings. The Search Appearance section of this box includes a preview of how your site will show up on a search page, including options for both mobile and desktop display. Then you have the SEO Title, Slug and Meta Description, which will affect this appearance.
Your page or post has a title, which you can see and set in the editor. But the SEO title is a little different. The post or page title is the H1, or first header, on the page. The SEO title includes the H1, but it should contain more information about the page. At the very least, it should include the site name. By default, Yoast sets this up for you, but you can adjust it, including adding variables with the “Add Variables” button next to the text box. Yoast will also warn you if the title is too long in the SEO Analysis section.
The meta description is your elevator pitch. This is what the page is about. Write a brief description of the page, incorporating any keywords you want to rank for. Yoast will tell you when the length is correct with a colored bar below the text.
Here’s an example of how we show up in a Google search. You’ll notice the SEO title. In this case, Google is choosing its own meta description; it may do that if it feels like your meta isn’t as applicable to the page as taking a snippet would be. You should still fill out a meta description for your pages regardless.
The slug is what shows up after your site URL in the box on your browser.
If this has some descriptive value and aligns with the content on the page, it strengthens the signal of what the page is about to search engines. If it doesn’t match, it can be detrimental.
Analysis tools
Yoast includes a number of analysis tools for your posts and pages. Before you get too far into the page or post, you’re going to want to set a focus keyphrase for the page. Figure out what the main thrust of the page is and what makes sense as a keyphrase, then add it here.
You can also click “Get related keyphrases” to search for other options.