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WordPress SEO by Yoast: Plugin installation and set up guide

posted on February 11, 2016

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WordPress SEO by Yoast: Plugin installation and set up guide

If you have a WordPress website, you don’t have to work hard to optimise it for search engines.

Make no mistake, I am not saying SEO is that easy, or that I have mastered it for that matter.

But when you have a cool, all-in-one plugin to set your site perfectly up for SEO, things get a lot easier instantly.

WordPress SEO plugin is the name and it is also called as Yoast SEO plugin or WordPress SEO by Yoast. And its free for the most part. You have to pay to use some additional features.

But mostly, you will do just fine with the free version.

The plugin incorporates a wide range of SEO features and hence is not straightforward to set up. If you don’t set up the plugin properly you might miss out on its awesome features.

How to install and set up the Yoast SEO pluginClick To Tweet

So let’s get to the set up!

Contents

  • 1 Installation of the WordPress SEO plugin
  • 2 Moving on to Titles and Metas!
  • 3 The Social module
  • 4 Yoast SEO – XML Sitemaps
  • 5 The Advanced settings
  • 6 The Tools
  • 7 Search console

Installation of the WordPress SEO plugin

You can skip the installation part if you already have the plugin installed.

Go to your WordPress dashboard and hover over Plugins and click on Add New. On the top right search box type “WordPress SEO” (without the quotes) and click enter.

You should see a plugin named “Yoast SEO” as shown below.

WordPress SEO installation

Go ahead and install the plugin (you will see “Install now” button in place of “Installed” if you have not installed the plugin already).

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, scroll down in your WordPress dashboard and you will see the SEO module as shown below.

WordPress SEO dashboard

First you need to click the “General” link. You will get this screen.

Yoast general settings first tab

You might want to take the tour if you wish, by clicking on the “Start tour” button. Or take a look at the latest changes in the plugin by clicking on “View Changes”.

Be careful about clicking on the Restore Default Settings since that will erase any settings you make and default to the plugin’s original settings.

On the next tab you have “Your Info”.

Yoast your info

Here you should fill out your website’s name and an alternate name that you want Google to consider.

Then you should choose whether your site represents a person or a company. And then, of course fill out your name.

The Webmaster tools tab helps you to get your site verified with Bing, Google and Yandex Webmaster tools, as well as get verified with Alexa.

You don’t have to use this tab if you have already verified your sites with these Webmaster tools. But if you haven’t yet, this is a pretty handy way to do it!

Yoast WebMaster Tools

On the Security tab, you will have the option to disable the advanced Meta settings. I’ve disabled it on my site.

Yoast security

The Onpage.org tab lets you enable the onpage.org indexability check on your site. Enable this.

Yoast onpage

Visit onpage.org for more details about this!

Moving on to Titles and Metas!

The General tab lets you to set the Force rewrite titles option. This option lets Yoast plugin to decide whether it needs to force rewrite the page title of any page or post.

If you leave this option ticked, the plugin may choose to force rewrite your post title depending upon the main keyword you fill in the meta data (more on that later).

I don’t have this option enabled.

Yoast title

The title separator lets you to choose a separator that will appear in search results between your post/page title and the site name.

Here are some examples of separators as shown in search results.

Yoast title separator

On the Homepage tab, you can edit the title and meta data of your home page and front page!

Yoast homepage

On the post types tab, you can write down the title and meta descriptions for your pages. You can leave the title template as it is, unless you know what you are doing.

Yoast post types 1

Yoast post types 2

Yoast post types 3

Here’s where you choose to noindex, nofollow your pages. For instance, you might want to noindex affiliate links. Here’s where you choose to do that.

Also if you want to specify a unique Breadcrumbs title to one of these post types, you can do so in the corresponding box.

The taxonomies tab helps you set up the same stuff for your category, tag, format pages.

Yoast taxonomies

Personally, I’ve noindexed and nofollowed the Tag pages, while I’ve not done so for the Category pages. So this totally depends on your SEO game plan.

Next comes the title and meta set up for the Archives page. You can choose to noindex, nofollow the author and date archives page if you want that.

Doing so will help you with the duplicate content issue where the content on your blog page and archive page might match.

Yoast archives 1

You can also disable the author and/or date archives altogether if you wish.

The Special Pages heading lets you set up the title template for your Search and 404 pages. You can change them as you wish!

Yoast archives 2

The Social module

In the Social module, you can let Google know about your site’s/company’s social media profiles.

Yoast social accounts

In the Facebook tab, make sure you have Add Open Graph meta data ticked. This ensures that your meta data are properly pulled when your post/page url is pasted on to Facebook.

Yoast Faceook

Also if any particular post or page doesn’t have a featured image, you can let Facebook know what image to use as backup by specifying the image URL in the box shown above.

You can also link Facebook Insights for your site by adding an admin; as well as connect your app to your site by providing the app ID in the box shown above.

In the Twitter tab, you have to make sure you’ve chosen to add Twitter card meta data. Also choose the default type of Twitter card. I prefer summary with large image.

Yoast Twitter

In the Pinterest tab you can add the Pinterest verification meta tag data.

Yoast Pinterest

In the Google+ tab make sure you have checked the Add Google+ specific post meta data. Also enter your Google+ Business page URL into that box.

Yoast Googleplus

Yoast SEO – XML Sitemaps

This is one of the amazing features of this plugin. Everything is kind of automated, you don’t have to do anything.

You simply have to make sure that you have the check box to enable XML sitemap functionality.

Yoast XML

In the User sitemap section you could choose to disable the author/user sitemap.

Yoast author sitemap

Under the post types section you can choose which of the post types you would want to EXCLUDE from your sitemap – that is, whatever you tick here won’t be included in your Sitemap.

Yoast post types

You can also exclude specific posts from being included in the sitemap by giving the corresponding post ids.

Yoast excluded post types

You can find the id of a specific post by hovering over (don’t click) its edit link and noting down the numeral as shown below.

Find post id

Similarly if you want to exclude any taxonomies, you can click on the appropriate check box in the Taxonomies tab.

Yoast XML taxonomies

The Advanced settings

This section deals with Breadcrumbs, Permalinks and RSS settings. First Breadcrumbs – you can enable breadcrumbs on your site just with the click of a tick-box.

The rest of the settings help you to define the separator, prefix, breadcrumbs for the archive, search and 404 pages.

Yoast advanced breadcrumbs_1

You can choose the taxonomy types to show in breadcrumb. Clicking on that drop down button will give you the options to choose from.

The permalink tab lets you to do quite some stuff regarding the permalinks. First, you can choose to strip the /category/ slug from category url.

For instance I have a category called Web Hosting at this blog and its URL looks like this > http://www.besthostinganddesign.com/web-hosting/. It is because I have ticked that option as shown below:

Yoast advanced permalinks

Without this ticked, the category URL will show like this > http://www.besthostinganddesign.com/category/web-hosting/. This just makes the URL unnecessarily long.

If your post had an attachment, selecting the Redirect attachment URL will redirect the attachment file URL to the associated blog post/page.

Make sure you select the Remove stop words from slug, so words like a, the, is, to will not be included in the post URL (automatically).

You’d also want to remove the ?Replytocom variable.

The RSS tab lets you to add content before and after your RSS feed. If you want the auto blog sites to stop misusing your content or if you want to add branding to your feeds, you can do so. Use the variables given below as help to add content.

Yoast RSS

The Tools

The tools module helps you to do bulk editing so you can change the title and description of your posts and pages in one shot.

You can also have your SEO files edited using the Filed Editor option.

Yoast tools

The import and export settings helps you to import or export settings from other SEO plugins.

You can also recalculate SEO scores of all the pages and posts on your site.

Search console

In the search console module, you can connect your Google search console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to your website so you can view the data right from your WordPress dashboard.

First you need to go to Settings tab and authenticate your Search console with Google.

Yoast search console settings

Once you’ve done that you can view the corresponding Search Console data in the rest of the tabs – Desktop, Smartphone, Feature phone.

That’s it! You have installed and set up the Yoast SEO plugin successfully.

How to install and set up the Yoast SEO pluginClick To Tweet

In this tutorial I’ve shown and discussed the WordPress SEO settings to my preference and how I use it. But you can tweak certain bits according to your preference and according to your website’s SEO plan.

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Filed Under: Plugins

About Jane Sheeba

I'm Jane, the owner of Best Hosting And Design, where I help bloggers and website owners to create and maintain their websites. Check out the services I offer here so you can make use of them. For cutting-edge business tips, please head over to Jane Sheeba.

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Comments

  1. charan

    February 11, 2016 at 10:48 am

    Hello Madam! wonder with your blog post and genuinely it’s a best set up guide for a blog with WP Plugin and i also recommend wordpress is the best platform for blogging and without any troubles can make a good blog and as far as i knew you have many blogs and offers many internet services, we need serious bloggers like you and read your education background is totally different but still your contribution in blogging industry is amazing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

    Reply
  2. Sherman Smith

    February 12, 2016 at 10:07 am

    Hey Jane,

    Thanks for this tutorial on WP SEO by Yoast. From this tutorial I can see that with all the integration I can get rid of some plugins that I don’t need. This will definitely speed up my site.

    Thanks for the detail info! Have a good one!

    Reply
  3. Rithika

    February 25, 2016 at 3:32 pm

    Hi! Great Post.

    I just downloaded Yoast SEO onto my website, but I now have a message that says this:

    Your theme contains a meta description, which blocks Yoast SEO from working properly, please delete the following line, or press fix it:

    Warning!

    The Header and Footer plugin(s) might cause issues when used in conjunction with Yoast SEO.
    Both Yoast SEO and Header and Footer create OpenGraph output, which might make Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks use the wrong texts and images when your pages are being shared.

    It then has a button that says to deactivate my header and footer.

    I do have a header and footer plugin by Stefano Lissa. Will I mess up my website if I deactivate the header and footer?

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Jane Sheeba

      February 29, 2016 at 11:37 am

      Hey Rithika, You should click on “Fix it” that comes next to the notification and Yoast will automatically fix that issue for you.

      Let me know if that works.

      Reply
  4. Md Arman

    March 26, 2016 at 7:12 pm

    Hello Madam! wonder with your blog post and genuinely it’s a best set up guide for a blog with WP Plugin and i also recommend word press is the best platform for blogging and without any troubles can make a good blog and as far as i knew you have many blogs and offers many internet services, we need serious bloggers like you and read your education background is totally different but still your contribution in blogging industry is amazing .
    Once you’ve done that you can view the corresponding Search Console data in the rest of the tabs – Desktop, Smartphone, Feature phone.
    Will I mess up my website if I deactivate the header and footer .
    Than You

    Reply
  5. Roshan

    April 5, 2016 at 6:32 pm

    Hello thanks for your in-detail post,

    I too have Yoast for my website, But I’m facing some issue with the meta tag. Can you help me in that?

    Help from any most appreciate.

    Thanks In Advance!!!

    Reply
  6. Arjun Rishi

    July 13, 2016 at 12:47 pm

    Wonderful guide. This is very useful post. Keep sharing such a useful post. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  7. Clyde B.

    September 8, 2016 at 6:05 am

    Excellent post, well written and truly a great guide.

    I just wanted to update you – you can no longer claim sites on Alexa (Alexa Verification)

    And if you are just starting to optimize your site’s on page seo you will want to enable ‘force rewrite titles’ for your website just keep in mind how the “Site name | Page title”
    should appear in search engines and this will also be uniformed thru your entire site.

    Reply
  8. Kimsea Sok

    September 8, 2016 at 12:04 pm

    Hi, Jance.

    I’ve been with Yoast since started my first blog, but sometime feel like missed some features of the plugin. Thanks for sharing, this’s the completely detail and step by step tutorial for Yoast plugins.

    I believe this article will be a very useful resource for my audiences. I shared and bookmarked the article, and I will link to the post when there is any relevant.

    Reply
  9. Gopi

    November 6, 2016 at 3:50 pm

    Nice guide for wordpress seo yoast plugin good one.. cheers

    Reply
  10. olutayo

    November 10, 2016 at 8:31 am

    This post on WordPress seo plugin was a massive one. It’s very educating and intriguing. Good work! I got some ideas which I am going to use on my new blog.

    Reply
  11. Krithika

    December 19, 2019 at 12:29 pm

    A great Plugin installation and setup guide by Yoast SEO .Thanks a lot !!!

    Reply

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I'm Jane, the owner of Best Hosting And Design, where I help bloggers and website owners to create and maintain their websites. Check out the services I offer here so you can make use of them. For cutting-edge business tips, please head over to Jane Sheeba.

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