Here at Rainmaker Platform HQ, morale is high as we head into Q2. We knocked out several important updates in the first quarter of 2025, 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 headed your way soon to help with that … stay tuned. In the meantime, let’s get into this month’s State of the Platform.
Rainmaker Platform Update 3.5.1
Our latest release 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 powerful reporting interface that allows you to check status for every system email sent.
FluentSMTP requires some manual setup. If you need help adding 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 fully integrated with 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 areas of your site, there is a pane with Yoast SEO options:
The settings here are critical to making sure your content displays correctly for third parties like Google and social media sites.
Ignore the Yoast settings and you leave content display entirely in the hands of these third-party sites. You need to understand how to use these settings and control the first impression people get when they see you on Google, Facebook or any other third-party site.
In this State of the Platform, we’re going to define those settings so you understand what they are. Stay tuned for next month, where we’ll take you through some best practices for your Rainmaker Platform SEO.
The SEO Tab
This is the first tab you’ll see in the Yoast SEO settings pane.
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
The bulk of these settings are the display options. The Search Appearance section includes a preview of how your site will show up on a search page, with 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 contains more information about the page. 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.
In the Meta Description box, you can 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.
This is how the SEO title and meta description will show up on a search page. You’ll notice here that Google is pulling its own meta description; that can happen, but it’s still important to write your own, as the data in it is still used by Google for rankings.
The slug is what shows up after your site URL in the box on your browser. You can edit this in the Slug box. Don’t leave the slug, the SEO title or the meta description blank.
Analysis tools
Yoast includes a number of analysis tools for your posts and pages. To use these, you’ll need to set a focus keyphrase. This is the main idea of the page or content.
You can also click “Get related keyphrases” to search for other options.
Once you’ve set the keyphrase AND saved the page, you can open the part of the pane that says Track SEO Performance. This gives you the option to turn on tracking for this page and use the third-party service Wincher for insights.
Yoast also includes a built-in checker that looks for best practices and common issues, and updates live as you fix them, even taking you directly to the problem in the content. Open up the section of this panel that says SEO analysis and you’ll find a long checklist to follow:
Finally, the Insights section will tell you how easy your copy is to read.
Page attributes
There are two sections that fall under page attributes: Cornerstone content and Advanced.
The Cornerstone content section simply allows you to designate certain pages and posts as “cornerstone.” These are the pieces of content that you consider the most important on your site.
Very few admins should touch the Advanced pane; this section includes settings for some specific search engine edge cases like canonical links and nofollow. Only use this pane’s features if you understand how they work.
Readability
Just like the SEO checker in the previous section, we have a readability checker available in the Readability tab.
This readability checker will give you an idea of where your content could stand to be improved. Click any of the blue links to read more about how the text should look on Yoast’s website.
Inclusive language
If you have the inclusive language setting turned on in your Yoast settings, you will see this section — otherwise it’s hidden. The Inclusive language section checks your content for terms that might give offense to some readers.
Schema
The Schema section allows you to set the type of content you’re creating, from Web Page to Scholarly Article to Medical Web Page. These structured data tags are supported through Schema.org, founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, and are broadly supported across the Internet.
Social
In the Social section, you can add specific settings for how your page is displayed on social media platforms.
You can choose an image for social media, set a title different than the page or SEO title and add a description that’s different from the meta.
There is a separate section here called X appearance. The main social media settings apply to most platforms, but X (Twitter) is unique and needs its own setup.
Understanding the Yoast Settings
If you’ve been baffled by the huge number of settings in the Yoast pane, hopefully this State of the Platform has helped. This is the first part of two. In the next one, we’ll take you through some of the most important settings and give some recommendations for how you can set up your Rainmaker Platform site content for SEO success. Thanks for reading, and as always … if you need a hand, just drop us a line, anytime.
Best Regards,
Ed Bardwell
President
Rainmaker Digital Services