Ader
First action – start your own project from scratch and track everything you do, every change you make along with keyword positions.
It should be about something you're really excited about. Travel blog maybe. Any kind of blog is good.
University magazine is not the place to try some SEO tactics.
Green lights do not equal to good rankings. Yoast's and Google's algorithms are not the same. Green light just means that content is somewhat optimized for that keyword. You lack info, whether or how much people search for the chosen keyword…
Readability is not that important.
These are not dumb questions at all. Learning is about questions. Good luck!
As for the magazine:
First find out which pages are ranking for which keywords – note that down as 0 point.
After 10 months you can check rankings and traffic again and there it is, a good case study. "I grew traffic x % in 10 months"
Then try to do a keyword analysis to see, which keywords people actually search for
Prioritize keywords
Create a content plan according to keywords / edit keywords to existing content plan
Optimize pages already ranking and create new content based on new keywords
Try also to do a technical audit about loading speed etc.
Always take first steps with your own site and see what happens. Then apply what you learned to the magazine's website.
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Diaz
Hey Laura, your questions are not dumb at all, we all start somewhere😉
My first suggestion would be to stop using Yoast recommendations or at least don't look at what goes green and what not. I'm using Yoast only to set up my SEO Titles, meta description and things like that.
Readability I'm sure it's important but not for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it's important for User Experience (UX).
– I'd say make sure you have your keyword in the right places (url, h tags, in the body)
– If you use images, stick your keyword in the alt tag attribute as well
– use related keyword in h2s ,h3s
– interlink your pages
Watch these guys on Youtube to learn more … they are very helpful:
SEO Fight Club
SEOThisWeek
Chris Palmer SEO
Campbel
Diggity
And there are others …
Good luck👍🍺

Meakin
Hi Laura
Great work with getting involved in the student magazine and picking up SEO skills, that's some great initiative right there 😀
Optimizing for the Yoast green light is a good way to get started in SEO but you'll soon notice it's limitations. You often end up having to change text to "fit" what Yoast thinks without regard for users or even search engines.
What area of journalism are you hoping to get involved in? It might be worthwhile getting some knowledge of Google Discover and Google Publisher Center as these tend to focus on more news / journalism stories. If you end up working as a freelancer you can make some good coin from selling links too 🤫😀
I'm currently looking for someone who can write good headings and meta-descriptions, if you're interested drop me a PM (this is a paid gig).
Good luck with it all! 👍

Joost de Valk
Hi, Joost from Yoast here.
It's funny how people call our stuff outdated without ever looking at what we actually do.
That green light is a helper, it's certainly nothing more than that nor do we claim it is. It is however constantly improved and adjusted, by a team of language scientists we employ. Keyword density is no holy grail, it is however a relatively easy concept to explain to beginners, and does help them understand the basic requirements of writing for SEO.
Our internal linking algorithm uses TF IDF to determine content within your site that could be relevant for this post.
All of these are suggestions we give to users, in the end, the user/writer has to think for themselves.
As for people saying it's over optimizing; well, no, because we prevent for that too. You really should try our software before you shout stuff like that. And yes you can probably show me examples of where we're wrong, but I can also show you millions of sites that benefit from our software every day.
The plugin also does tons more; it adds schema, it outputs all the needed meta data, it has good XML sitemaps, etc etc.

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Erin Morris ^🎓
As a journalism student I'm guessing you are a writer? Being a natural writer gives you a natural advantage because you're already writing for the people, which is part of what those algorithms are being trained to detect. Once they perfect it I imagine the robots will be taking over. But back on topic…
The readability score (with the advice to shorten sentences and in general make the writing dumber) is geared more towards sales copy. With articles, stick to your English training 🙂
The one common mistake I see in journalism or literary pubs is being too clever with titles and content. Like at some point you need to say exactly what you're talking about if you want to attract traffic, preferably in the title and once again in the body…and synonyms are your friends.
And don't write too often about topics for which you don't want traffic.

Ankit
Hi Laura
In my opinion, the best thing you can do is start a blog (not a free hosting one).
Learn the art of writing content in such a way that it answers almost everything about the topic.
Divide a main topic into sub topics and write thorough articles about each one of them in a way that all get interlinked to each other in some way (not forced, but naturally).
Think from the perspective of a user: if you landed on the blog you just wrote, did you get all the information? Do you need to make another Google search for something? Did you like the story telling? And many such factors.
A well crafted content and content strategy goes a long way. Technical SEO comes second which will eventually come with practise, experimentation and implementation.
Feel free to PM me for any doubts you have along your journey. I would be happy to help.

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