How to Use Yoast SEO on WordPress Complete Tutorial

As a result, even though the Yoast team is doing a fantastic job of making SEO beginner-friendly, there's still an opportunity to get guidance on how to use Yoast SEO. To give you that help, we've written this monster Yoast SEO tutorial.

This is a huge guide that we've split it into two parts:

• A beginner's guide on Yoast Search This section, we'll cover tips for first-time users and non-proficient users. If you're already acquainted with Yoast SEO's basic settings as well as the Yoast SEO meta box, you'll probably find it to be to be a bit redundant.
• The advanced guide to Yoast SEO This section, we'll go over more advanced tactics like meta variables for title and description, noindex tags, and more. Even if you've already started making use of Yoast SEO on your site, you can probably benefit in this section.

Are you ready to understand how to use Yoast SEO? Click here to jump right to the more advanced section. If not, let's go back to the start!

The Beginner's Guide To Yoast SEO

In this part, we'll cover everything you need to know if you're new to SEO with Yoast. You'll learn:

• How do you correctly enter data in the configuration wizard
• What the Yoast SEO metabox is and how it functions
• The things you can do from your Yoast SEO dashboard

Next, in the section, we'll look at some of the most advanced Yoast SEO options.

Using The Yoast SEO Configuration Wizard

After installing Yoast SEO, you can gain access to your Yoast SEO dashboard through the Yoast SEO option within your WordPress dashboard.

If this is your first time using the plugin, you should see a big notice for First-time SEO configuration.

Clicking the configuration wizard link, Yoast SEO will give you a guided tour to assist you in setting up each of the SEO basics:

Just click the link. Then, on the first page of the wizard click Configure Yoast SEO.

We'll guide you through all the settings within the wizard for configuration.

Section 1: Environment

If you're working in the area of Environment zone, make sure you select Option A unless you're working on the development of a site

Section 2: Types of sites

Within the section titled Site Type section, you should choose the type of site which best fits your website:

Section 3: Organizations or the individual

Choose next whether the website you are using represents an entity or a person.

If you select Organization, you'll be asked to enter the following information:

• Name of the business
• The logo for your organization ( 112x112px, at a minimum. We suggest a square logo.)

If you pick Person, you'll just need to type in the name of the person.

Enter all of the social media accounts for your website. If you're developing a website for an organization, this will be your organization's social media profiles. If you're a user, you can edit the information, including your social media accounts, the username and description of the user on the WordPress account page.

There is no need to sign up for each one of them. Just pick the ones which you are actively trying to encourage:

This area helps Yoast SEO provide additional information to Google to generate a Knowledge Graph Card. They are very attractive and every piece of data helps

Section 4: Search engine visibility

99.99 The majority of time, you want to use these as defaults. Unless you already know how to do it, don't make any changes:

Section 5: Multiple authors

If you're the sole person authoring your blog, Yoast SEO will automatically identify your author's archive as noindex in order to prevent duplicate information (noindex tells search engines that they should not index that page).

Yoast SEO does this because when you visit a single writer's blog, archives by the author exactly match your actual blog index page.

If you plan to use more than one author, select yes to ensure that users can discover a particular author's posts archives on Google results.

6. Google Search Console

If you're not sure what Google Search Console is, don't hesitate to click Next and leave this page to the present. While Google Search Console is definitely something to look into in the future, it's not something that's vital to the functionality of Yoast SEO:

7. Title setting

By default, Yoast SEO makes your title:  The Post Name is separated by a separator. Name Website Name

Within this area, you are able to pick:

• The name of your website
• The *Separator*

For example, if your blog had the subject line "How to Utilize Yoast SEO" and you set the above settings, your site would look like this in Google:  What is Yoast SEO? How To Use Yoast SEO Demo Site

Closing Up The Configuration Wizard

In sections 8 and 9, Yoast SEO will try to guide you towards:

• Join our newsletter, the Yoast SEO newsletter
• Purchase Yoast SEO Premium, keyword research and training, or plugin-related training

  You do not need to do one of those things unless you'd like to.  

Just keep hitting each time until you are at section 10 - You've made it! And then click Close:

You've just set up Yoast SEO!

Utilizing Yoast SEO's Meta Box

In a daily basis, it's the Yoast SEO metabox will be where you interact with the plugin in the greatest. The meta box helps you by:

• Assessing your content's quality in SEO and its readability
• Letting you configure settings for how your content functions in Google as well as on social media

• (1) - lets you switch between Snippet Preview, Readability Analysis, Focus keyphrase, and Cornerstone content
• (2) - allows you to access more settings to social media
• (3) - gives you access to additional options

Content Optimization Tab

Content Optimization tab is a key part of the process. Content Optimizationtab is mostly focused on how well optimized your content has been for search engines.

The initial section of the tab for optimizing content will be the Preview of Snippets.

It's important to know this information since it's the information that will show up in Google's organic results for searches:

In the Readability analysis area, Yoast SEO tries to apply the same idea to humans. Essentially, it tries to gauge the degree to which your content is readable be to humans and provides suggestions on how you can improve the readability of your content.

These suggestions aren't perfect - so don't feel like you're required to achieve a perfect score. They're nevertheless a useful general guide to follow:

In the Focus keyphrase section, you are able to enter the Focus keyphrase for your content that you want to optimize to be optimized for.

It'll tell you the things you're doing right as well as what could be changed. If you are using the premium variant of Yoast SEO you may also add a related keyword.

Important to keep in mind that Yoast focus keyphrase doesn't help you rank in Google. This is only a suggestion to assist you in optimizing the content you publish.

Within the Cornerstone content section, you have the option to decide whether or not you want to label the article as cornerstone content.

Cornerstone content constitutes the foundation of your site's content. It is comprised of the top and most significant content on your site; those pages or articles which you wish to rank the highest in the search engines. The Cornerstone article is typically lengthy, well-written articles that combine information from various blog posts while covering everything relevant to a particular topic.

That is, you should select only the best content and posts or pages which you intend to keep up to date as cornerstone content. Then, you can easily sort your cornerstone content in the posts and page lists.

Yoast SEO Social Media Tab

On the Social tab, you have the option to set up how your content appears when it is shared via Facebook or Twitter:

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This is the information that a social network automatically generates whenever a URL is shared:

  The majority of the time there is no need to set this up manually to each blog post since Yoast SEO will automatically generate it on the basis of:  

• The SEO title you have
• The featured image of your content

But if you want to alter the defaults of your browser This is the place to can do that.

Yoast SEO Advanced Tab

Most of the time there's no need to glance in this tab. tab called Advanced tab. However, if you'd like to:

• Stop Google to stop indexing this specific document. Or in other words permit or deny search engines from displaying it as a result in the search results.
• Make sure to specify a canonical URL in order to avoid duplicate content.

If so, here's how you can do it:

Exploring The Yoast SEO Dashboard

Once you've got Yoast SEO configured and understand the meta box, let's explore the dashboard.

On the main screen of the Dashboard (Under General), Yoast SEO will notify you about any potential SEO issues that could affect your site.

For example, you can notice how Yoast SEO doesn't like the manner in which our site's tagline is still the default text.

Yoast will give you instructions on how you can fix the problem. You can also remove the alert if do not want to tackle it.

General Tab

Generaltab Generaltab isn't terribly significant, but it will let you:

• Use the wizard to configure your computer.
• Check the number of internal hyperlinks in your blog post

Features Tab

The Featurestab has a little more juice than the previous tab. Within this tab, you can enable or disable certain features of Yoast SEO.

If, for instance, you don't find the Readabilityanalysis within the Yoast SEO meta box useful, you can turn it off by clicking here:

It is also where you are able to disable or enable security for authors. The advanced portion in the Yoast SEO metabox lets users to eliminate content from search results or change the official canonical. These are things you might not want any author to accomplish. This is why, by default only administrators and editors can do this. Set to "Off" allows all users to change the options.

With the latest editions of Yoast SEO, there is no more a area for this. But you can still find a link to your XML sitemap by expanding your XML sitemaps tooltip by pressing the "See your XML sitemap" hyperlink.

To exclude certain post types from your sitemap, this is done via the Search Appearance part further below.

Webmaster tools Tab

In this tab, Yoast SEO can help you validate your website using a variety of search engine's webmaster tools:

The Most Advanced Guide To Yoast SEO

Congrats! Now, you must have an adequate knowledge of the Yoast SEO's primary settings and features.

In this part In this article, we'll look deep into the more advanced options which Yoast SEO is able to hide away.

Search Appearance Options

Do you need to modify the knowledge graph and schema.org information? Perhaps you didn't use the wizard to configure. You can access this under the Search Appearance section. Select the General tab. You can edit your organisation as well as your personal information.

As of April 16 April 16, 2019, Yoast SEO version 11+ has more structured information than it has ever. The data is added in JSON-LD format to the code of your website and support Organization, Person, WebSite, WebPage, and article schema.

You can test your WordPress website with this Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

Its Search Appearance section offers amazing ways to automate many of the on-page SEO.

In essence, Yoast SEO lets you define templates for the SEO titles and meta descriptions for your entire:

• Posts
• Pages
• Custom-made post types
• Taxonomies
• Custom taxonomies
• Pages from the archives

The reason this is so effective is that you can use a wide range of variables that allow you to insert data dynamically such as information in customized fields.

There is a complete list of these variables by clicking the Need help? Button and choosing the Snippet variable tab:

If you scroll down to the Advanced variablessection, you can find an array of time-saving tricks that are really cool.

As an example, say you run a coupon website and would like to be sure that your article's title appears as follows:  Coupon - Updated In Februaryof 2018

Rather than manually editing the title each month in order to ensure it is up to date You could make use of the variables %%currentmonth%% and the %%currentyear percentage variables to let Yoast SEO take care of it for you.

Other options you have to do in this area include:

• Noindex tags can be controlled for certain types of material. If you make something noindex, Google won't index this type of content within its search results. This is powerful so use the method with care. Change the default settings only if you know how to do it and what effects.
• Control whether or not you want the Yoast SEO meta box should show for particular kinds of material.

Taxonomies Tab

One of the greatest features is the option to delete the category name in your URLs:

Breadcrumbs Tab

The breadcrumbs feature is a way to navigate which look like this:

They're generally considered to be a plus for helping users navigate your site.

In this section, you'll be able to activate them using Yoast SEO. But,you'll also need to insert a code fragment into your theme to enable the breadcrumb function working.

RSS Tab

Social Alternatives

The Social area, you will be able to configure more general settings for the way your website interacts with various social networks.

Most of the times you'll need to remove these as the defaults, but:

Tools Options

In the final, the Tools area lets you access different editors along with the possibility to export or import the settings of your Yoast SEO settings:

If you select the option to edit the file option, Yoast SEO will help to create the robots.txt file (if you don't have one already). And once you have the file, Yoast SEO will let you make changes right on your dashboard:

If you do not see the File editor choice, this is a sign that you're experiencing one of two issues.

1. The installation of your WordPress install has an option to disable editing of files.

How To Use Yoast SEO for Your Daily Website Life

As we hit the end of this guide, let's review the guide with a glance at how you'll actually make use of Yoast SEO within the course of your daily WordPress day-to-day.

A majority of Yoast's SEO options are "set it and forget it". Once you get everything configured, the only area that will be used on a daily day basis will be your Yoast SEO metabox.

For every post, you must, at a minimum:

• Input a key phrase that you want to focus on. You don't need to address every suggestion of Yoast SEO, but seeking an approval is generally an ideal objective.
• Set up to set the Meta Description and Title SEO. Even if you created a template that is good however, you'll need to manually edit these for all posts, to ensure they are the most optimized possible.

Other items you could be able to tackle might be:

• Readability
• The social settings are particularly important in the event that you feel a certain item is likely to do great on social media.

Any other questions about what you can do with Yoast SEO? Comment below and we'll rank your website!

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