: WP Yoast SEO's focus search term; is it necessary? On Yoast's SEO plugin @ Wordpress, I can provide one search term per post, which is the key term, the focus term (don't know the English

@Caterina187

There is a YouTube video (several) of Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam team, speaking a few years back at a webmaster's conference about WordPress and SEO (his blog is on WordPress).

It's perhaps 45 minutes long and worth a watch. As @JCL1178 noted, it is generally better to have some variety if everything matches up perfectly it may seem (to search engines) as "too good to be true".

This site generates everything programmatically but if I were manually optimizing, I'd make the URL (i.e. slug) /seo-wp-yoast-focus-term-necessary.

While I'd make the <h1> something like:
WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, is the focus term required?

That way, I rank for different variations of the same query but there is enough alignment that it is clear what my page is about.

Granted this isn't always an option but natural variation is good, at least, as per Matt Cutts.

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@Gretchen104

The focus term (or phrase) is used by the Yoast plugin to check the page/post content for SEO against that specific search term. So using your example of "Hello World" with "hello" as the term, the Yoast plugin will check to see if and how many times the word "hello" appears in the


Article Heading (any H tag in the body)
Page or Post Title
URL slug
Content
Meta description


and based on those results plus an analysis of other factors (found under the Page Analysis table in the meta box on the post edit screen) the plugin will assign a red, yellow, or green light to the post where red is not well-optimized and green is well-optimized.

It does absolutely nothing to Google. It is purely for your own quick testing to see if the page or post might do well against a hypothetical search.

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