Here you will find all details on how to setup Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress easily.
SEO is one of an important factor for a website to rank on Google or any search. To get a good SEO, you need to configure your website well. Each and every page or post in your website should have a good Title, meta description. Also, in case you are a blogger on WordPress, you need to use keywords in your blog in such a way that the search engine can find you when a user enters a search. There are many plugins available in the WordPress plugin store which could help you to make your Page and Post SEO better, but yoast is one which I consider as the best.
Yoast SEO has been a companion for WordPress sites for a long time, and many people that I know use Yoast SEO as their main plugin to set up their pages.
The thing here to be noted is Yoast SEO plugin works only on WordPress. So If you have a WordPress website, then things are easy for you.
Also Check our Google Pixel 5 review here
Let’s begin with the setup.
How to set up Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress
Installation
First thing to do here is install the Yoast SEO plugin into your WordPress account.
Steps:
- Login to WordPress account.
- Now you will be in the dashboard, so click Plugins button in the left sidebar.
- Click on Add New plugin.
- Here you will be seeing the Plugin page with a search box section.
- Click on the Yoast SEO plugin, and you will see an install Button in the resulting page
- Click on the Install button and
Now, the Yoast SEO plugin is installed in your WordPress account.
Let’s now configure the same for you to get the best Search Engine Optimization added to your site.
You will see an SEO button newly added to the sidebar. Click on that.
The plugin page will load, and you will be in the home page of Yoast SEO plugin.
Basically, there are 5 tabs that you will see in the Sidebar if you have installed the Yoast SEO plugin.
- General
- Search. Appearance
- Social
- Tools
- Premium
Yoast SEO Setup
Yoast SEO plugin is one of the main plugins used by many bloggers and website creators who make websites on WordPress. This plugin provides a variety of options to configure your site effectively.
General yoast setup options
In this page you will see 4 tabs
- Dashboard
- Features
- Integrations
- Webmaster
Dashboard: This tab shows all the basic information about your yoast setup and if there are any issues in the setup or how you have configured your plugin, you can see it in this tab.
Features: This is one of the most important part of yoast SEO plugin.
Feature tab contains the following options that you can enable or disable.
SEO analysis: This helps you analyze your content or post that you have added to the website and check if it’s good for SEO and does it need any changes to make it better. By default, it’s kept on, and I would suggest you keeping it ON.
Readability analysis: This part helps you to check the readability score of your post or your page.
If the content is having any issues with English and if you are using an unclear way to explain the thing that you want to add, then it will help you to correct it.
Cornerstone content: This is one of the most feature rich post or page that your website give most value for. You can make any post as cornerstone, but that article or post should be well written and organized.
Text Link counter: This is another important aspect of ranking. It is a process of making internal links within a website.
Crawlers from various search engines will go through your website based on the interlinking of the pages. You should create links between posts and pages so that you can better SEO.
XML sitemap: A sitemap is a very import addition to your website. It gives the full address of each and every page that is in your site, so that adding an XML sitemap to your webmaster tool may be Google or Bing will help the bots to easily identify the pages in your site and crawl it to their index.
You can easily generate sitemap from yoast SEO plugin by clicking the “?” button near to the XML sitemap option.
- Admin bar menu: This contains the important options for 3rd party tools for analysing pages.
- Security: no advanced or schema setting for authors: This helps the site owner to remove the post from search results or mark it as canonical.
- Usage tracking: Basic site data and the plugin related usage can be tracked using this option
- Rest API: Headless WordPress site could use this to generate metadata.
Integration tab:
This is a new addition to Yoast SEO plug in where you can integrate SEMrush and Ryte options. This is set by default ON and let it remain ON.
Webmaster Tools:
One of the major part of nay website is to add the site to a webmaster so that it could index it. There are many popular webmaster tools available like Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex.
You can go to the specific webmaster tool where you want to index your site content and copy the HTML tag and paste it here so that your website will get added to the Index.
After adding the necessary values to these options, click on Save changes button so that your first step for setting up Yoast SEO plugin is done.
Now lets move on to second part
Search Appearance:
This tab contains the core part. Edits that you have done in the General tab part will take effect based on the settings that you are doing in the Search Appearance tab.
Inside this tab, you can configure what you want to show it to the users of your site and how things should appear. This is a major part of how your site is crawled by the search engines, and it will really help to make your SEO better.
Here you will see tabs like
- General
- Content Types
- Media
- Taxonomies
- Archives
- Breadcrumbs
- RSS
Let me explain to you the uses of each of the tabs above so that you can configure.
General:
This tab basically has the details like Title separators that you need to use in our title. All pages or posts in your website will have a URL and there will be Permalink.
You might have noticed separators there for each words in that link. This separator specifies that.
You can select it as your need from various options available in this page.
You can also find links to change the description of your home page as well as blogs page here. Click on these so that you can edit those pages as you need.
Another section in this page is Knowledge graph and Screma.org.
Here you need to mention yourself as a person or an organization who is maintaining your website.
Then there is a personal info section where you can enter your Name and upload an Avatar or a Logo. These are very simple things to do.
After you have completed the process. Click on Save changes.
Content types:
Here you have some important things to do.
This page helps you set what you need to show in search results and what should be avoided.
Here you will see Options like
- Post
Under post, you can see two options for Setting for Single Post URL’s
Keep these option ON
Then come SEO title and Meta description. You can edit the SEO title in each page or post also you can set it in common here which will be applied in all pages or posts that you create.
Best setup for this option is the following
Excerpt: It’s a short description of your post or a page that you add to a page description that a search engine looks to display as a result for a search query.
You can add Excerpt as default by clicking the Insert variable button at the top right of the box and selecting it, or you can enter %%excerpt%% in that box.
This will help adding meta description to your post or pages even if you forget to add it manually.
Also, you can select the Schema settings here, which means the way you want to show the Post page look like.
You will find many options under this like “Web page” as the default page type and the Default Article type as “Article”. These are the best and the default option. So keep it unchanged.
The same options are available for the following tabs as well
- Pages
- My Templates( Only if you use a designer)
- Quotes( Based on plugin).
I would suggest you keep the settings for. Post and the Pages to be ON and make others OFF so that you can avoid duplicate content.
Click on Save Changes button after completing.
Media:
This is a major part of any website. You will add images and videos to your site, so you need to redirect the user to the page showing that content in search.
As we know, our images can also appear in search result which can help in SEO. I would suggest keeping it ON.
Taxonomies:
These are options where we organize our content in our website. We categorize our content based on its type and add tags to the content that we post in our website.
Inside this tab you will find
- Categories
- Tags
- Formats
- Quote Categories
I would suggest you keep the Categories On but turn other options like Tags Formats, Quote Categories OFF as this will stop adding duplicate content to your website and if the sitemap is having these URLs when the Google or any bots crawl your site they will find multiple items with same name.
As we mention tags related to the post or page that we are creating, they get added as a URL to the sitemap.
This will cause similar items to be added and will make duplicate content. Because of this, your main post will not be crawled, and a tag will get crawled, which you don’t want.
So keep it organized by just enabling categories and disabling all other options here.
You can keep the Categories URL at the bottom to be ON or Keep and click Save Changes
Archives:
As the Tags and Formats, you also don’t want to show the Author archives and data archives in the search result. So it would be better if you could turn them off as well.
Breadcrumbs:
Breadcrumbs are the way how your post or page is listed in search. You can see in any search result that they will have separators to make it look good.
Also, you can see some page descriptions are shown in bold in search. With the Breadcrumbs, you can manage that.
I would suggest you to keep them enabled for better results.
Leave the RSS feed as it is without any changes and click “Save changes” button.
Now you have completed the main part of how to setup Yoast SEO
Social:
This is the option available Yoast SEO plugin where you can configure the social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
If you have a Facebook app ID or a Twitter profile, you can add it and see how your shared posts will appear in Twitter and Facebook.
It’s upon you if you need to set it up, or else you can leave it as it is.
Tools:
These are options that will help to improve some core factors of your website. You may be knowing that all sites have robots.txt file which the bots from a search engine looks first.
If a page or a post is blocked by robots.txt, then that is not added to the search result.
You can edit those things here.
Import and Export: This is an option to import or export your Yoast SEO plugin setup to another blog or use another blog setting in this one.
You can import the full setting from another blog that is yours if you have set up the Yoast SEO plugin there so that you do not need to configure all things again here.
File editor allows editing robots.txt file and. htaccess file. You can configure and enter your sitemap URL to robots.txt so that the crawlers can easily check on all pages in your website.
Bulk editor comes handy if you want to edit all the post title and description at once. This comes handy in some cases.
Premium:
This is a feature that all plugins mostly have. It provides some advanced options to add multiple keywords and synonyms to your page or post so that it could rank easily.
You can get it if you need high level optimization, but I would suggest if your website is new then you can use the free plugin as it provides most of the options you need.
Conclusion
Yoast SEO being one of the best SEO plugin that you can use in word press, installing and configuring it well will really help you to rank in web.
This topic of how to setup Yoast SEO plugin will give you some basic idea that you need to apply for getting a good result in search.
If you have anything to add, then please mention in the comment so that we can also know about it. Also with this you should set up accelerated mobile pages so that you can rank better because AMP enabled page will be faster in mobiles compared to a Non AMP page.
