A Guide to set up Yoast SEO

SEO plays a major role in building your brand name and therefore you have to choose a reliable plugin that will help in your business expansion. Yoast is a trusted name for building SEO.

Yoast emerges frequently whenever you search for Best WordPress SEO plugins, as it has multi-purpose functions for all your website related needs.

Benefits Of Using Yoast:

SEO drives the necessary amount of traffic towards your website which is important when you're doing your business online. Yoast SEO plugin helps in powering your online marketing business as it has multiple customizations to fit for your needs.

Start With Installation Of Yoast SEO



To get things started you need to first install Yoast plugin. As the dashboard opens, take your cursor to the "Plugin" tab, then click on it and click on "Add New". On the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see a search bar where you have to type Yoast SEO.

To get to your general settings navigate to Yoast>SEO> Dashboard. Then click on the ‘General’ tab at the top. Here you’ll be able to take a tour of the plugin, see any major changes they’ve made to their plugin, and restore to the factory default settings (if you’ve made some changes you want to erase).

Once you see the option click on the Install button. The plugin activate link opens, click on the blue content that says "Activate". Once you have successfully activated Yoast SEO you are set to go. This will activate the SEO option for your site. On the bottom left-hand side, you can see SEO written.

1- General Settings

How to set up Yoast SEO to optimize your website?



Yoast tenders many features that are highly beneficial for your website. Don't get confused as there is a complete guide on how can you set up Yoast SEO to your WordPress website.

You can get the general settings from Yoast- SEO- Dashboard. Then click on the 'General' tab at the top. You can take a tour of the plugin and view any major changes made and then restore to factory default settings.

On the 'Your Info' you can change the name of your site as well. Also, you can assign an SEO expert who can help you with the building up your brand name. SEO can help in increasing website traffic to a great extent and improve your Google ranking.

Features Of Yoast SEO



Before choosing Yoast for all your SEO needs you need to focus on its benefits and key features that will help your business.
  • It allows you to edit your htaccess and robots.txt files
  • It can generate an XML sitemap
  • Enables you to export data from other SEO plugins as well
  • Comes with Google search display preview option
  • Liberty to index and non-index your content
  • Verification and linking with Google Webmaster tools
  • Assistance for optimizing keywords

Webmaster Tools



You need to monitor how your site is performing. And to do this you need specialized tools to analyze your growth. Using this tool you can check how your site is responding to various search engines. As per the requirement, you can then do changes to boost your performance.

Security

Security on your posts is very important to avoid over customization. You can restrict people with having only administrator access to make changes like Canonical URLs, Set redirects and non-index settings.

Search Appearance

Titles & Meta Optimization



Hopping onto the next part is the optimization of meta descriptions and titles of your site. Whatever settings you do will result in having the influence on your posts and website when they’ll be displayed in the search engines. It’s crucial to optimize these settings for the click-through rates of your search engine. With the help of navigation, adjust these mentioned settings to “Yoast> Titles & Metas.”

On your website’s main screen, you can permit either you want that plugin or you don’t or whether you want to edit the titles of your website or not. Generally, the plugin will automatically detect whether your title should be re-written or not, so normally you don’t have to actually do the setting adjustment.

Turning on the 'Enable analysis' part can be a boon as it’s very helpful. This section will give you recommendations on every page’s or blog post’s bottom which you will create to enhance the readability of your posts.

Content Types



The section of ‘Post Types’ will let you adjust how your page titles and post should be displayed in the search result page.

If once again you’re recommended to adjust your website’s “Title templates' to highlight what’s being displayed in the image section. The remaining settings of checkboxes can be left like this.

When you do settings in “post titles”, firstly, it’s recommended to post your title, which will be followed by the name of your website. The title of any other information will just engage more space and will likely confuse and disturb the visitors of your website.

Homepage



It’s our recommendation to adjust your “Title Template” because it’s highlighted in the image above.

It will give you ample space for your title to optimize and create such a title which is attractive to the end user and more and more clickable in search engines. You can even make adjustments in your meta descriptions, which will be exhibited when your home page is ranked in the search engine page.

Taxonomies



WordPress already creates some default taxonomies. So, you normally won’t need to create anymore. The existing title format for these sections should be fine.

Already, WordPress has created some of the default taxonomies. Therefore, you don’t usually require to create anymore. For these mentioned sections, the title format which already exists should be correct.

Nonetheless, we recommend switching or changing the  ‘Tags’ and ‘Categories’ sections to Noindex. This will avoid Google to index these website pages in the search result

This will prevent Google search engine from indexing these pages in the search result page because they generally do not provide that important value to your end users or visitors. Nevertheless, it depends on your website’s structure and if the category pages of your website indeed provide the value.

Archives



This section of the website allows you adjusting the titles displayed for the archive pages of yours, you should select to enable them. You will see some different types of archives which are created by WordPress: date archives, special pages, author archives, and 404 pages.

To lessen the possibilities of content which is duplicate, it’s our recommendation that disables the ‘Author archives’ and Noindex. In an identical way, “Date archives”, which does not actually provide any sort of value to search engines.

Breadcrumbs



Breadcrumbs represent the path the site user will take to reach the desired web page.

For example:

Home->Blog->Blog->Guide.

It helps you in fleshing out the look of your SERPS and assist the top search engines to obtain a nicer idea of the appearance of your website.

RSS feed



RSS feed settings are to add a link to your blogs, which means if your post happens to get rubbed, so the search engines and readers will come to know that you're the genuine source of the blog posts. You can add as many links to your blog posts as you want.

Other

The last tab in the section of title and Meta gives you some more settings to adjust. By letting all these settings when switched off, you will help to clear your search results and keep away from having irrelevant elements which disorganize the title of your post.

3- Google Search Console

Click ‘Get Google Authorization Code’ and you’ll be redirected to a window where you can get the code. Then copy and paste the code into the box and you’re all set. This will assist you in keeping track of your site information and you can fix any crawls that occur.

As soon as you get to know about crawls, it's better to fix them. To use its additional features, get the premium version of it.

Not only this, analysis tools make it simple to create an SEO-optimized meta description, slug, and title.

4. Social

Talking of future aspects, Social media is in full mode to play a huge and significant role in SEO. Yoast nicely merges with nearly each of the social media networks. On the website’s main screen, you will be able to insert the profile URLs of yours for any social media platforms you are active on.

Accounts:

Facebook

On the Facebook tab, you can configure your “Facebook Open Graph Meta Data/tag”. This will offer more options to you to configure Facebook post of yours on it from inside of “WordPress Editor”. If you’re having your Facebook page, then you are also having the option of adding theFacebook admin of your own to get additional information regarding page traffic.

Twitter

On the Settings tab of Twitter, you can adjust how to display the “Twitter card” that appears when you share the post. Selecting “Summary with Large Image” gets a better conversion in comparison to having solely a title.

Pinterest

Pinterest make use of identical Open Graph metadata similar to Facebook. You will be needing to enable the Meta information of Facebook for Pinterest media to work. Once you’re done with this, you will need to confirm your website accompanying Pinterest and everything is just perfect now!

4. Tools



Yoast SEO comes with some extremely useful and powerful in-built tools:

One of the most useful tools is File editor tool> it allows users you to change quickly files for your SEO, such as .htaccess file or robots.txt.

Another important feature comes with Yoast SEO is that it have bulk editor feature, which allows you to edit your post and metadata in bulk. but, do not use plagiarism content for your descriptions, as it will impact negatively on your website.

Another great feature of Yoast SEO, the function of import & export permits you to transfer your settings from one plugin to another. If you want to save the settings as a backup option, you can create a backup for you.

Yoast SEO also comes with a text link counter. It calculates the number of links in your post. This tool is very useful and actionable.  Text link counter consists of two link counters. The first one counts the number of internal links in your post and the other one to count the number of internal links to your post.

5- Premium

The premium version of the Yoast SEO has even more features to offer you. The additional extensions and tools for your SEO needs will help in enhancing your efforts in minimal time.
  • A dedicated and expert team that provides you a 24*7 assistance. You have any plugin related issues you can contact the experts and they will in resolving your issues.
  • An inbuilt redirect manager that helps in setting up your website.

4. XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps does help Google and more search engines to index your content more effectively. Make a thought of this as a map a search engine bot can be used to crawl your website and witness when you have updated your site.

On the first screen of your site, assure that the button of XML Sitemap of yours is enabled. After that, you have to click on the box which says 'XML Sitemap', and now ‘copy and paste’ that particular link into your own “Google Webmaster Tools account”. This will connect both of them together so that data will be shared between the two active platforms.

User sitemap

If you’re having the feature of multi-author blog, where there’s an abundance of authors, who are active enough, then you have the opportunity to create sitemaps specific to authors. However, we find it needless and choose to disable this option.

Post Types

Talking of this section, you can opt which category of the post types you want to include in your Sitemap. It’s our recommendation to for Mirroring Settings that we have selected above. In most of the cases, there is no point for any website to e appearing in the “Sitemap” of yours.

Excluded Posts

If you have some posts that as per your knowledge are not in favor of including in the ‘Sitemap’ of yours and contains “Google crawl”, add the Post ID’s to the box.
If they do not display it automatically, you might be required to enable the Post ID’s accompanying a plugin such as “Reveal IDs”. Then, the ID’s will be showcased on the tab of 'All Posts' of the dashboard of your WordPress.

Taxonomies

In the ending section, you can further decide if you want to or doesn’t want to include particular tags or categories inside your sitemap. We have chosen not to include tags or categories inside our sitemap, but it is dependent on the entire website’s structure of yours.

5. Advanced

Yoast SEO, advance setting take your search engine optimization efforts to the whole new level. The advanced settings are too simple, however, they can be advantageous for your website too. This will enable you to modify the Permalinks, Breadcrumbs, and RSS.

Permalinks

To have an SEO optimized URL, it is very important to adjust your permalinks. So make sure to change the setting of your permalinks. In case, you haven't, learn below how to change them.
Steps:
  • First, go to Settings
  • Next click on Permalinks
  • Change your setting to " post name".
  • it will offer you strong support to work from.

8- Optimizing Your Content

YOAST SEO truly works when it comes to page and post optimization. After completing all the base set, now its time to optimize each and every page of your website.  this will help you in doing right onsite SEO.

Tips to optimize site content and posts:

Optimizing Posts and Pages

Yoast SEO will be found in the mid of the post. this Yoast Box will let you optimize each element of your content.  This analysis tool will also analyze your content post and will help you optimize your each site post.

Snippet Editor

This allows you to modify all the content and post data that are shown in the google search engines.  At this time, you can optimize the content for both tour search engine bots as well as site readers.

Focus Keyword

The analysis and focus keyword section permits you to put the content keyword of your preference and see how your optimization efforts impact on it. the more green circles you find in your analysis, the more your content becomes best for SEO.

Readability

Now, next, to focus keyboard, you will see the Readability section. this section helps you in knowing whether your content is easy to read for your audience or not. easy to read content will enhance the site user's experience. it lowers the site bounce rate and increases the average time spent on the site.

9- Customize your categories

Just like your pages and post, you can even customize the SEO meta description and titles for the category, author page, and tag.

The steps are simple:

Go to visitor's posts-> Click on categories page-> press the edit link below the category you want to optimize. On that page, go down to center you will see the SEO meta box.

Like that you can do the same for all other categories, author archives and tags.

Hope, our guide to "how to set up Yoast SEO" helped you. Do you think that we missed any of the steps? Do let us know and share your reviews.

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