Every blogger/webmaster wants to rank their content higher in search engines and hence they need a complete SEO solution for their WordPress blog. If you’re the one who seeks the same, then I’d suggest you to download the most popular plugin, WordPress SEO by Yoast. This plugin is a good alternative to “All in One SEO pack” which would improve the onsite SEO of your website/blog.
This WordPress plugin was created by Joost de Valk which has been integrated with awesome features for its users. As it is a powerful search engine optimization plugin, it is being downloaded by most of the people. If you want to concentrate the important aspects of fine tuning of your onsite/onpage SEO, you may get this striking tool.
Some newbies might feel tough to configure this WordPress Yoast SEO plugin and hence I’ve decided to write a complete post on it. But before getting into the details of its configuration, let me tell you some reasons why to use this plugin for your blog/website.
Why to use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin?
Following are the reasons why WordPress Yoast SEO is my preferred plugin,
- Helps to write better content with good keyword density.
- Includes XML sitemap to submit the sitemap to Google.
- Robots.txt file in dashboard can be configured.
- Possibility of integrating social profiles.
- RSS feeds can be optimized and canonical urls can be setup.
- Focus keyword, Meta title and description can be added to each page or post.
- Advanced permalink control and Breadcrumbs support.
- .htcaccess can be edited in dashboard.
- Export/import data from other SEO plugins.
- Stop words in the url can be automatically removed.
Instructions to configure Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
Go to Plugin -> Add New -> Write “Wordpress SEO by Yoast” -> Install and activate plugin.
1. Dashboard
After installing the plugin, click Dashboard to configure the basic settings of SEO by Yoast. You’ll be getting the below page
1. Check the security option.
2. While verifying your site with Webmaster, you got the meta values. Just copy those values into the above boxes to track your meta values to search engines like Google, Bing etc.
2. Titles and Metas
1. In title and metas settings, just check the options under General tab as shown below
2. Under Home settings, fill the Title of your webpage (describe your site name or slogan) with 70 characters. Write a short description about your website under Meta Description Template which should not be more than 160 characters. Also include 6-7 keywords related to your site in Meta Keyword Template section and finally click “Save settings”.
3. No need to modify the default Post Types Settings.
4. Now, we come to the important part of SEO section, Taxonomies that includes the titles and metas of “Tags” and “Categories” which need to be “noindex, follow”. So the change the settings of Taxonomies like below
5. Other tab has default settings but make sure that the “noindex, follow”s are checked like the same we’ve done in the Taxonomies section.
3. Social Settings
As the social media optimization is considered important these days, this excellent plugin has options to link your profiles of Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
- Facebook – Check the option “Add Open Graph meta data” and follow the steps to add Facebook insights and Admin. Then add your Facebook fan page and verify the ownership of the page.
You may also fill “Frontpage settings and Default” to an image and it will be displayed when someone shares your homepage link. Use 200 X 200 pixels image.
- Twitter – Click “Add Twitter Card meta data” to validate your Twitter cards and you can add your Twitter username.
- Google Plus – Tick the option “Add G+ specific post meta data (excluding author metadata) and include your Google publisher page (Your site’s G+ About page)
4. XML Sitemap
Xml Sitemap help search engines to crawl and index your site efficiently and you may change its settings like below
5. Permalinks
I guess that the premalinks settings of SEO by Yoast have default good settings and check the following three options are enabled.
- Remove stop words from slugs – It will automatically remove the stop words in the url of the posts.
- Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URl – Automatic redirect feature for better SEO.
- Remove the ?replytocom variables – To get escape from duplicate content craw and index by search engines, otherwise you would be penalized.
6. Internal links and RSS settings
The internal links and RSS of SEO by Yoast plugin can be left at their default settings. If your theme supports and to make search engines understand your website structure well, the option “Enable breadcrumbs” can be selected on the Internal links settings. But I didn’t tried breadcrumbs for my site.
7. Edit Links
WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin offer options to edit Robots.txt and .htaccess files within the dashboard. So, you no need to go the Cpanel or FTP to modify the functions of your site (To stay safe, have FTP access while editing the .htaccess file)
The basic settings of WordPress Yoast SEO plugin are over and now check the details on how to use this tool while publishing a new post for your site.
Working of WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin
On-page SEO is more important and this remarkable plugin help you to do perfect on-page settings by including a focus keyword.
EX: My Focus Keyword is “Become a successful blogger”. Have a look at the screen shot below and see how the plugin ensures the perfectness of on-page SEO.
Regulate your content and try to get “Yes” in green colour like mine for your every post. (It should be done naturally, do not stuff the keywords in Title and content)
Based on your focus keyword, this plugin will analyse your whole post and under “Page Analysis” tab, you’ll get suggestions related to title optimization, keyword density, outbound links etc. In simple words, it will tell you whether your post is perfectly optimized or not. Have a look at the below screenshot.
You must fix the problems mentioned in Red colour. Orange and Yellow colour says “Its ok” but it would be good to repair them. Green symbol specifies the good/completed stuffs and you no need to do anything for them. You may improve keyword density, readability, giving outbound links with the suggestions given by WordPress by SEO Yoast Plugin.
Conclusion:
To maximize the onpage SEO of your WordPress blog/website, you may use WordPress Yoast SEO plugin. Implementing the above things for your site will not guarantee higher rankings on search engines but it will give a solid foundation to build rich quality content.
I hope you find this tutorial helpful to configure and use “Wordpress SEO by Yoast” plugin. If you have any queries/difficulties, feel free to comment and discuss with me.
Ohh my god,
This is really one of the most valuable and detailed article about WordPress SEO Plugin BY Yoast, i have seen ever. You mentioned all the step-by-step tricks which is very helpful for all the bloggers.
thank you so much bro for sharing this precious article with us. i am going to share this article with my friends 🙂
Thanks Amit, for stopping by. We are trying to bring more how to guides on TTW. Thanks for sharing this post with your friends.
Hi Atish,
You’ve written a helpful tutorial for us, thanks!
WordPress SEO By Yoast is an awesome plugin and am using it from long. I always follow the suggestions given by this plugin and it helps me to get good SERP for my blog posts. As you specified, on-page settings is most important and we can do it perfectly with this WP plugin.
Thanks again for presenting this nice tutorial, hope it would help the newbies.
Thanks Nirmala for stopping by. Keep coming and keep sharing your views on the posts of TTW.
Hello Atish,
Nice tutorial here. As we know that SEO by Yoast is the best SEO plugin for WordPress, I am too using that plugin. After reading this post I knew that i have to do much more for my blog. Thanks for sharing. Keep it up.
Thanks For coming by Neeraj. Yes this is one of the coolest plugins for wordpress SEO.
I didn’t know that the WordPress SEO Plugin BY Yoast is such a powerful tool. I really liked the feature about keyword focus. This is jackpot.
Glad that you came to know about this plugin from our blog. keep coming.
Yes very nice article you have written Atish,Really i am also the blogger but i never seen such type step by step instruction of the wordpress SEO by Yoast .
Thanks you for sharing this information with your .
Thanks
Alex
Thanks for praising Alex. Keep coming!
Hi Atish
Greetings for writing such a wonderful tutorial to fully optimize the Yoast Plugin. Its many initial functions remain in state of disuse at most of the blogs and just its features related to post SEO are generally utilized.
You well covered all the things to do and also justified with your knowledge why to do these things.
I do appreciate your efforts especially at the part of providing technical value to your blog audience and it really solves a big problem of specially those bloggers who are not much techie.
Thanks a lot for sharing this wonderful resource.
Thanks for the comment Mi muba. Yes, How to guides always solve problems of many. Thanks for reading the post.
Great job brother
After reading your article I realized that what I was missing in On page SEO.
Must say it is one detailed and useful article I have ever seen
Thanks a lot 🙂
Thanks for reading the post Rajesh. I am glad that you got to know where you are lacking.
Complete step by step guide for Yoast! Good one Atish bro.
I am already using this plugin and it has always been handy and beneficial for doing SEO for my blog post.
Submitting site on different search engine is easier using this plugin.
Thanks for sharing.
>Sk Lohar
Good to know that you are using this plugin. Keep it up! Thanks for reading the post Shiv.
Thanks Atish,
For sharing this plugin and writing its useful features, I always enjoy your blogpost.
karan
Great article Atish,
I have used SEO by Yoast for quite a time now and this is best tutorial until now. I had some doubts regarding meta keywords and they are now clarified..
Aha, great post Atish. WordPress SEO by Yoast is definitely my favorite SEO plugin, and frankly the only SEO plugin that I currently use on my WordPress sites. Although it’s very user friendly, it’s also very hard to use for the beginners at the same time. I’m sure this guide will help them out, thanks for sharing anyways 🙂
Thanks for the valuable post. It’s really useful for readers. I was using All in One SEO for long time and I decided to use Yoast plugin. In order to understand it i searched and found your article.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I really appreciate your efforts.
Finally i got the full guide to setup seo by yoast on my blog. After following all steps now my blog is seo optimized. Thanks for sharing this wonderful tutorial.
Thanks for the post Atish.I was in search of such post for quite some time.
You have explained in very well, I was looking for this kind of detailed post on Yoast setup.
Thanks for sharing.
I would say this is a pretty effective article for new wordpress users to understand and use Yoast for optimizing their blog. The article above definitely summarizes the entire process and gives a detailed understanding of the different sections which come inbuilt with Yoast plugin. Nice article indeed
This guide gives me a lot of stuff i can do on our WordPress site. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There’s a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you’ll have to actually do most of it and create great and compelling content in the process.Thanks for sharing this post .Love it:)
Thank You Atish for this valuable article. In the Yoast Seo Plugin there are many extra features than All in one Seo. The one of the big feature of this plugin for me is that it give quick SEO analysis of my blog post which helps me to improve my site on page seo very easily.
And by reading your article I have used some other features also about which I was not aware that time and now I am enjoying them.
Nice Explained it. I got the better idea of SEO by Yoast. Now, I’m going to use your techniques in my blogs. Thanks for sharing this very informative guide.
Hey Atish,
Thank you for the wonderfull post,I am planning to move my blogger blog to wordpress & this post will help me to insall This SEO plugin.
Again thanks For sharing the post with us. 🙂
WordPress seo by yoast is a must have plugin for any WordPress website. You have provided an easy and detailed guide to configure it. Thanks.
I have been using SEO by yoast on almost all of my blog to optimize my blogpost. It gives almost everything that our blog needs for SEO, if we have newly installed WP blog, we just have to install SEO by yoast and configure it as recommended SEO configuration and we have done. It also help us for sitemap, meta keywords, meta description and target keywords and much more than that.
Thanks for the detailed information on configuration of SEO by yoast, it would be helpful for more and more bloggers who are new to wordpress plateform.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Yoast’s WP plugin Bhavesh. It’s really great.
I would like to know if Yoast has a setting to fix the Canonical url issue. My new WP site is set up without the www and I want the www in the root domain url when the site gets indexed. I looked in the Yoast settings and I cannot figure out how to change the setting.
Hey Darrel,
I think when you go to wordpress setting >> General and there you put your url with www, the issue will be fixed. Do it and let me know if that fix your problem.
Awesome post Atish bro Though I am late just finished doing the customization thanks for this post cum tutorial.
Great! Thanks for coming by Swadhin.
Really informative guide. mostly user not configure correctly including me. when i first & second attempt on this plugins.
Nice post Atish Ranjan
The Meta Description box no longer appears on my post dashboard. How do I get it back?
Hello Halil,
It is there only, but that is now prefilled. You just need to click on that to edit and write your own meta description. Let me know if you still don’t find it. Thanks for visiting.
I did as you said, and it’s working now. I think it resulted from the recent update.
God Blessd
great to know that, Halil
I’m also Using SEO by Yoast this is best SEO plugin for WordPress After Read Your This I make some changes in my plugin Settings. i hope these chnges work better for my blog.
Thanks
Really informative guide. mostly user does not configure correctly including me. when I first & second attempt at this plugins.
I am also using YOAST and it is easy to use and it made my work very easy.