Installing and configuring Yoast Seo to optimize Seo for wordpress - Part 1 - HOSTVN Blog

Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and offers the most comprehensive toolkit to optimize your website.

However, many beginners are often unfamiliar with SEO and find it difficult to configure.

In this tutorial, we will guide you to install Yoast SEO plugin and some configuration to help optimize SEO for your website.

What is Yoast Seo?

Yoast SEO is the most comprehensive WordPress plugin with many integrated tools and features. Here is a quick overview of some of its features.

• Change SEO title and meta description on each post.
• Title and meta description support for categories (e.g. categories and tags).
• Preview the excerpt.
• Check keyword focus.
• Meta Robots configuration: Easily add noodp, noydir meta tags, add noindex, or nofollow.
• Configure RSS title / footer.
• Breadcrumbs support.
• XML sitemaps with: Images, taxonomy configuration, pages or posts with no content will not show up in XML sitemaps.
• XML news sitemap
• .htaccess, robot.txt
• Verify Google Search Console, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools

How to install the Yoast SEO Plugin

First, what you need to do is install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install WordPress plugins.

Upon activation, you will see a new menu item in the WordPress admin bar labeled SEO with the Yoast SEO logo on it.

How to set up Yoast Seo

Before you read on, note that the settings we selected are the ones we recommend. So for experienced users, you can skip anything you don't like.

If you are a beginner and you want to use Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin like us, then follow the instructions below.

Step 1: General settings

Clicking on the SEO icon will take you to the plugin's settings page. At tab Dasboard you will see a button to open the configuration wizard .. We want you to skip this wizard, because we will guide you through the configuration step by step through each option.

Step 2: Features

Yoast SEO comes with lots of features. The Features tab allows you to easily enable and disable those features. By default, all options on this page are enabled.

We will introduce some of the functions in this article. For now, we will take a quick look at some of its features and effects.

• SEO Analysis: Display SEO score and analyze your article content.
• Readability Analysis: Displays an analysis of the readability of the article.
• Content platform: This feature allows you to bookmark and filter Cornner content. These are your most important posts.
• Text link counter: This feature displays the number of Internal and External links in a post.
• XML sitemap: Create an XML sitemap for your site.
• Ryte integration: Ryte is a third-party service that checks your site weekly and notifies Yoast SEO if your site has a problem.
• Admin bar menu: Display the Yoast SEO menu on the WordPress admin toolbar.
• Privacy: no advanced settings for authors: Hide advanced SEO settings from authors to improve security.

Step 3: Webmaster Tools

The popular search engines allow website owners to add their websites using the webmaster tool area.

Yoast SEO makes it easier to verify your website with all the leading search engines. To do that, you need to register the webmaster tools program for each search engine.

You will then be asked to add meta tags to verify your site ownership. Just add the meta code you get from the search engines in the respective fields.

Step 4: Search interface

The search interface in Yoast SEO settings controls how your site appears in search results. This includes a number of options for your homepage, posts, archives and categories.

We will guide you through each step. First, let's start with the general settings.

a. General

Here you can choose the separator between the titles you want to use. The default option is a dash, you can use it if you're not sure which icon to choose.

On this page, you can also choose an SEO title and description for your site's homepage.

Right below, you will see the settings Knowledge Graph & Schema.org for your site. You can choose whether your website represents a company - an organization or an individual.

You can also upload an Avatar (profile picture) for a personal or website logo for a business.

b. Content Types

You can choose a title and description tag for each post or page you write. Yoast SEO also allows you to set up an automated template to use.

In case you forget to add them manually, these options will allow Yoast SEO to use the default settings to automatically fill in those options.

However, we recommend only adjustments SEO Title and leave the field blank Meta description. This will allow Yoast SEO to automatically generate a description from the first few lines of your article.

c. Media

By default, WordPress creates a new page for every image or video you attach to your posts and pages.

The attached pages do not have important text to give search engines a context. Such sites are considered low quality content by search engines and have a negative impact on SEO.

Yoast SEO helps you fix that by redirecting users to the attachment instead of the attached page. This option is set to Yes, by default and you do not need to change.

d. Taxonomies

On the Taxonomies tab, you can configure titles and meta for categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and archive pages.

The default variables will work for most websites. For descriptions, please remember that Yoast SEO selects descriptions from your categories and tags.

e. Archives

The Archives tab allows you to control the search appearance options for miscellaneous archives on your site. This includes author, date, search and 404 page.

The default options will work for most websites. However, if you wish, you can disable the author's archive page from search engines.

The author archive pages are the same as your date archives or blog pages. This creates duplicate content that affects your SEO rankings.

f. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are very good for internal linking because it identifies a clear path or link to the page you are visiting. Breadcrumbs also appear in search results giving your site an added advantage in search.

Make sure you click Enable in Breadcrumbs settings.

The default settings will work for most websites, if you want more powerful Breadcrumb features, you can learn more about the plugin. Breadcrumb NavXT

g. RSS

RSS Feeds are often used by others to copy content from your site. Yoast SEO allows you to add a backlink to your site for each post in your RSS Feeds.

This way, you will get backlinks from your article copy websites and Google will know that you are the original source.

There are options to add author links, post links, blog links and blog descriptions. So be creative and customize them accordingly. This can also be used to add ads to your RSS feed.

Step 4. Search Console

Part Search Console in the Yoast SEO plugin, allows you to connect your WordPress site to Google Search Console (Formerly a webmaster tool).

You can also connect WordPress to Search Console and allow Yoast SEO to fetch and display data in your search dashboard.

Just visit SEO »Search Console and click the ‘ Get Google Authorization Code Code.

You will be redirected to Google Search Console where you will be required to authorize. After that, you need to copy and paste the authorization code into the plugin's settings.

Step 5. Social

As we said earlier, Yoast SEO is a plugin that integrates many features to provide comprehensive optimization.

Another great feature of the plugin is that it integrates your website with social platforms Facebook, Twitter… ..

Click on it Social SEO menu will take you to the page to set up these platforms. We will show you how to configure each item.

a. Accounts

The first tab to add your social accounts. This allows Yoast SEO to tell Google about your social media profile. You only need to add the URL and Twitter username for the social networks you use.

b. Facebook

You need to make sure that the Open Graph meta data display option is enabled in the Facebook tab. It allows Yoast SEO to add Facebook's Open Graph meta data to the site's intro.

This will help Facebook choose the right thumbnail and page information when a post from your site is shared on Facebook.

Next, you need to provide the Facebook application ID if you have one

Below that, you'll find the option to provide thumbnails for your homepage with titles and descriptions. This image and description will be used when someone shares the home page of the website on Facebook.

Alternatively, you can provide a default thumbnail image URL. This image will be used for all posts without thumbnails or any other images.

c. Twitter

For Twitter, you can add Twitter tags to the top of your page.

You can also choose the type of card to use. We recommend you to use summary with large image.

d. Pinterest

Pinterest uses the Open Graph meta data just like Facebook. Make sure that you have enabled Open Graph meta in your Facebook settings.

Then you only need to enter the site verification code provided by Pinterest. Just visit your Pinterest account settings to add and verify your site. You will be provided with a meta tag for you to enter here.

Step 6: Tools

Yoast SEO comes with a number of built-in tools that allow you to perform some advanced tasks. Most beginners may not need to use these tools. However, we will show you each tool and its effects.

a. Import and Export

If you have previously used another SEO plugin or an interface with integrated SEO functionality, then you can use this tool to enter SEO data.

You can also use it to import and export Yoast SEO plugin settings and use them on another WordPress site.

b. File editor

As your WordPress site grows, you may come across instructions that require you to add some code to your robots.txt file.

This is a configuration file and has a huge impact on your SEO site. Yoast SEO allows you to easily edit both files directly from the WordPress admin area.

c. Bulk editor

The bulk editing tools in Yoast SEO allow you to quickly add SEO titles and descriptions to all your posts and blogs.

In the itle tab, you'll find a blank field to add a new SEO title for that blog post. Then click Save to save your changes.

To add a description, you will need to switch to the description tab.

We hope this guide helped you install and set up the Yoast SEO plugin. If you like this article, or have any suggestions, you can leave a comment below.

According to wpbeginner