The WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin is one of the most popular SEO solutions for WordPress. With lots of features and options, this will satisfy most, if not all of your SEO requirements. However, beginners often get confused with the array of never-ending options. Luckily, you’re in the right place. You will have your SEO settings rocking by the end of this article.
First of all, you need to download and install WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. After installing, don’t forget to activate it. Once it is activated, you will have a new menu titled “SEO” in your dashboard.
So, you have the necessary things in place now, what’s next? Well, let’s start configuring the plugin.
Setting up WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin
While we are at it, let me tell you that the settings I suggest in this article are my personal suggestions. You are free to choose other settings as long as you know what you are doing. With that said, let’s rock and roll.
General Settings
Click on the “SEO” link, you will be taken to the “Yoast WordPress SEO: General Settings” page. The “Introduction Tour” button will take you to a virtual tour of the various sections of the plugin. This is quite helpful it’s your first time using this plugin. Next, you have the button to reset the settings.
Below, check the “Tracking” box to send anonymous user data to Yoast developers. Next, check the security box too. This will prevent your writers from making unnecessary changes.
Webmaster Tools
I think you are familiar with most of the tools included here. These tools will help you in collecting useful information about your website. In some cases, you may need to upload a file or add Meta tags in order to verify the ownership of the site. Unfortunately, setting up Webmaster tools is out of the scope of this article. Nonetheless, if you have meta tags, feel free to add them in the fields.
Titles & Metas
This section has multiple tabs. We will start with General.
General
In this tab, you will be able to set up various things like the title separator, whether you want sub-indexing of archive pages, using meta keywords etc. All of them are self-explanatory and come with clarifications.
Home
There are only two fields in this section. From these two fields, you can set the title and meta description template for the homepage.
Post Types
As we all know, WordPress comes with some default post types including post, page and media. Additionally, we can add custom post types too. Yoast’s SEO plugin allows you to set title and meta description templates, meta robots, show date, authorship and hide meta box for each post type.
Taxonomies
This section includes features to set the title, meta information, meta robot and hiding meta box for tags, categories, post formats and any custom taxonomies.
Other
If you want to set custom title and Meta description for the author and date archives of your website, you can set them here. The section also allows you to set title templates for special pages like 404 and the search page.
Social
An awesome feature of the SEO by Yoast plugin is its powerful social media integration features. While Twitter and Google+ cover basic features like profile linking, it is Facebook that offers some great features.
First of all, make sure that the check box for Open Graph Meta data is checked. This will allow the plugin to add data from Facebook in the head of your website. This will result in better integration between your site and Facebook.
Set the Frontpage with the relevant information. You can set a default image which will be the default image for the shared posts or pages which do not have any image.
XML Sitemaps
Your sitemap is one of the most reliable and simple ways of getting noticed by the search engines. SEO by Yoast makes it very easy to create a fully-functional sitemap. Make sure that the first check box is checked.
Below that, you will find lots of options which will help you customize your sitemap according to your requirements. For instance, if you don’t want separate sitemaps for different authors, you can check the “User Sitemap” box, which will disable the feature.
Permalinks
The permalinks section of the plugin complements the basic permalink settings of WordPress. You can choose between different options including skipping the category name from the URL, enforce trailing slashes, removing stop words, redirecting attachment URL’s etc.
Internal Links
This section will allow you to add breadcrumbs to your website. There are lots of options to set up the breadcrumb like the separator, text for the homepage, prefix for the various breadcrumb items, taxonomy etc. The breadcrumb appears in the search results too, which is a nice touch by Yoast.
RSS
Using the RSS fields, you can add backlinks to your content. It is possible to add author link, blog link, short description, post link etc. You can also use these fields for inserting advertisements into your RSS feeds.
Import & Export
If you have followed me to this point, you have spent some time in the plugin tweaking the settings. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to apply these settings to another site instantly without having to set them again? Well, Import & Export section does just that. Cool, right?
Bulk Editor
Bulk editor allows you to edit or update the SEO title and Meta Description of multiple posts at once.
Edit Files
This section will help you in creating Robots.txt and update the .htaccess file for your site.
Phew, that’s all the settings of WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. There are quite a lot, but I hope you have a better idea about how to setup the plugin for your site by now. If not, let me know what you’re having problems with in the comments below. I’ll be glad to help you.