If you are using WordPress for your blog, then you must know about the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. This is a popular WordPress plugin (1 million+ active installations). This plugin will do almost all the SEO work with the least effort.
We are using the Yoast SEO plugin for different purposes. The configuration of the Yoast SEO plugin is quite confusing, so I am writing this tutorial about the installation and setup of the Yoast SEO plugin.
The Yoast SEO plugin comes with a bundle of features like-
- Webmaster tool setup: Alexa, Bing, Google, Yandex.
- Homepage title, meta description
- Post title and meta description for each post independently.
- Duplicate content prevention.
- Connect with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, YouTube, Google Plus, Pinterest.
- Submit XML Sitemap.
- Enable Breadcrumbs.
- Permalink, RSS feeds set up.
- Google search console setup, you can manage crawl error, desktop, smartphone, etc.
- Google search results in the snippet preview below the post.
- Setup a focuses keyword for each post.
Note- Use this plugin with caution because incorrect setup/configuration of this plugin may lead to impact your blog SEO.
Yoast SEO: General setting
In a general setting section, Yoast SEO offers you a webmaster tool, your info, and security.
In your info tab, you can set up the website name, and the mind behind it means the developer of the site. This site name and the owner’s name are considered for the search engine as they will be displayed on search engines.
In the webmaster tool tab, you can verify different webmaster tools like Alexa, Bing, Google, and Yandex. Webmaster tool helps your website to submit to a search engine.
The last tab security, if you uncheck it allows authors and editors to redirect posts, NoIndex them, and do other things that you might not want to keep checked.
Titles & Metas
When you click on titles & meta, you will see some tabs, and I will explain them all in brief. The first tab is a general setting where you can set up the separator between the post titles and the site name.
In the Homepage tab, you can set up the title template and the meta description for that, and it will appear to the search engine, so be careful about what you are writing.
The next section is a post type. In this, you can set up SEO for posts, pages, media, etc. SEO by Yoast automatically adds the Yoast SEO section under each post while writing, from there you can set up the post titles, Meta description, featured keyword, etc. all these will be visible to the search engine if you forget to add all these then it will pick up by default description from your post.
The next section is the taxonomies. In this, you can set up the titles and meta description for tags, categories, and post format. Usually, you don’t need to set up this section as the search engine will pick the default one for you.
The next section is the Archive section where you can set up the title and meta description for the author archive, unique pages like 404 pages, search pages, etc. In this, you should disable the author archive checkbox if only one author runs your blog otherwise keep it up as it doesn’t change any setting where it will affect the search engine.
Social
This section allows you to set up all the social networking sites that you use for sharing the post on social media in real-time. This section will tell the search engine about your social networking pages.
XML sitemap
A sitemap is essential for the website as it tells the search engine about your content, the XML sitemap is the fastest way to submit, and indexed all your data icon search engines. This section contains a subsection we will go into each of them
In the general tab, you will get the XML sitemap
In user sitemap keeps that checkbox checked, don’t change any setting there.
In the post type section, enable the checkbox that you don’t want to include in your sitemap, by default Yoast SEO disables the media attachment with a sitemap.
In excluding the post section you only eliminate the post, page from the sitemap, just put the post ID and save the changes.
In the taxonomies section, check the taxonomies that you don’t want to include in the sitemap.
Advanced
In the Advanced section, you can set up the breadcrumbs, permalink, and RSS
In the breadcrumbs section, when you enable this, the search engine will come to know the exact path of the post, this will act as navigation to your post. These breadcrumbs will be shown in the search result also.
In the Permalink section, you can set up the URL of your post, as there is already a WordPress permalink setting present, and this is the SEO Yoast Permalink setting so don’t confuse between this. Only check the below checkboxes
- Redirect attachment URL to parent post URL.
- Remove stop words from slugs.
- Remove the? replytoom variables.
- Redirect ugly URL’s to clean Permalink.
In the RSS section, you can automatically add the content to RSS, which means that you are adding a backlink to the blog, so when the content thief will automatically add this link while copying your content, it will help the search engine that you are the original content writer and you have the copyright of this content. For doing all, you only add at the end of each post “The post %%POSTLINK%% appeared first on %%BLOGLINK%%”
Tools
Yoast SEO provides us with some tools with the help of which we can easily manage all settings that we have done before.
Bulk Editor will allow us to edit the titles and meta description in bulk
File Editor will allow you to change essential files for your SEO quickly
Import and Export will enable us to import and export the SEO setting to reuse it again.
Search Console
Yoast plugin will allow you to connect your site with Google search console, all search console settings you can manage from this section, you will see not found errors here.
This is all about the free version of SEO by Yoast setup, I have written this article after reading lots of notes to avoid any mistakes if something is missing from it or some part of the setting I haven’t explained which you know then let me know. I will update those points immediately in this post.
If you like this post, then do share it with your friends. Also, if you have any concerns about the setup, then comment on this post.
