Yoast SEO plugin... and other SEO queries

[Russinating]

I'm doing some SEO tweaks and updating on our website which was had a UI update anyway. I always have a look at what other sites doing well for our search queries are doing and a phenomenal amount are using Yoast SEO plugin. Our site isn't Wordpress so I can't install it to see what it's doing on ordinary pages (rather than blog posts) or implement those changes manually.

How much difference it actually makes I don't know, but it's certainly a curious pattern.

Does anyone know, from using it, what it actually does, if anything of substance? And are there any other recent guides or updates that might be of us to me? I know a fair amount of the basics but a brush up won't do any harm.

TIA.

 

[touch]

I use it on pretty much all wordpress websites I build.
It doesn't do anything magic that you can't do on your own, just makes it easy to get all the SEO stuff correct on each page (titles, meta tags, markup, etc)
Also generates sitemaps and things for bots to use when crawling the site.

 

[Cromulent]

I ditched Yoast months ago. It doesn't add all that much you can't do yourself. Anyway, I'm building a custom blogging system that will fit my needs much better than Wordpress will and it will be able to import Wordpress websites as well so the change over should be nice and smooth.