The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress makes your life easy because it automates almost all SEO tasks for you. Yoast SEO plugin is an absolute must-have plugin for your WordPress blog. It gives you a lot of control of your SEO, and it’s very easy to use and lightweight.
Yoast plugin breaks down each option on the configuration page, which allows you to pre-selected options on the configuration page make some changes to the plugin setting.
Configuration of Yoast SEO Plugin
After installation of the Yoast SEO Plugin, click the SEO link on the left side of the Dashboard to open the Yoast SEO Dashboard page. Then click the General tab and follow these steps:
- Click the Open the Configuration Wizard button.
This step opens the welcome page of Yoast SEO and starts the configuration process.
- Enter your name and email address to sign up for the Yoast email newsletter. (This is optional )
If you do not wish to subscribe to the newsletter, leave the text fields blank.
- Click the Next button. This takes you to the Environment screen it means it will ask you what kind of your blog is and what is current status like if it a live blog or for testing purposes.
- Select Production from the Environment page option, and then click on the Next button.
Environment option page includes:
- Production: is this blog is a live blog with real traffic.
- Staging: is this blog is a copy of a live blog used only for testing purposes.
- Development: is this blog is running on a local computer and used only for development purposes.
- Now Select the type of blog status you’re building on the Blog Type page, and then click the Next button.
Available options on this page include:
- Blog
- Webshop
- News Blog
- Small Business Blog
- Other Corporate Blog
- Other Personal Blog
- Yoast Site Type Setting
- Select Company or Person on the Company or Person page according to your blog status and then click the Next button.
This data is shown as metadata on your blog and is intended to appear in Google’s Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base used by Google Search Engine to enhance its search results. Your blog can be a company or a person.
- Now add your social media profile URLs on the Social Profiles page, and click the Next button. (Optional)
- Select the options for your post visibility on the Post Type Visibility page and click the Next button.
WordPress automatically generates a URL for each media item in the media library. Enabling visibility allows Google to index the generated URL for the page, post or other media.
Select Visible or Hidden options for the following post types: generally people keep it all indexes.
- Select your option on the Multiple Authors page, and click the Next button.
Does your blog have (or will it have) multiple authors? Select Yes or No.
- (Optional) Enter your authentication code on the Google Search Console page, and click the Next button.
This step allows Yoast SEO to fetch your Google Search Console information. You can skip this section if you don’t use Google Search Console.
- Enter your blog name in the Title Settings page, select the character you’d like to use to separate your blog title and content title in the Title Separator section, for example: – (hyphen) or | (pipe) and click the Next button.
Type the Title of your blog in the blog Name text box.
The Title Separator displays, for example, between your post title and blog name. Symbols, such as a dash or an arrow, are shown in the size in which they’ll appear in the search results.
- Click the Close button on the Success page.
The Yoast SEO Welcome page
Later, If you find that you need to change any of the settings in the configuration wizard, click any of the links on the SEO menu in your WordPress Dashboard to change the Title tags, Meta tags, and Social Media profile URLs after configuration using a wizard.
All options that are selected by default should work fine for the blog. However, that Noindex is selected for the Archives pages (to find this setting, choose SEO→ Titles & Metas→ Archives) to make sure that the search engines are not indexing your archive pages. Indexing archive pages would provide the search engines with duplicate content that they have already indexed and that is one of the top ways of getting penalized by Google.
After all your selection you can click on the save button below of the screen to save it.
You can also use Yoast SEO Plugin default option and it works fine for all websites and blog but If you aren’t confident in fine-tuning it, you don’t have to do. But, keep in mind that you must put all proper information for your home page, including title, description, and keywords especially.
Social media Setting in Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO plugin also gives you control of SEO settings for each individual page and post on your blog including social media you can configure for individual page and post while creating/writing posts which include the following:
- Facebook and Twitter share title, description, and image
- Post/Page Title
- Parmalink ( or slug)
- Meta description (the short snippet of text that appears in search engine listings)
- Focus keywords
Content Analysis
This plugin also gives you features of real-time content analysis by rating its readability and keyword relevancy and it is recommended for improving both before you publish your content.
XML Sitemap
Yoast SEO creates Google XML blog maps for you, which you can configure by choosing Dashboard→ SEO→ XML sitemaps.
By default, it creates a sitemap for your blog at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml which contains separate sitemap for all posts, pages and media.
Conclusion: Yoast SEO Plugin is a world #1 SEO plugin used by millions of bloggers and internet marketers online for their WordPress website. it is easy to use and user friendly. if you like this post share with your friends and comment below what you think about it.
