Many plugins are available on WordPress plugins repository but Yoast is best than all of that.Yoast is best for its lightweight, for example, easy to use and comprehensive settings.Yoast can do each and everything that a professional SEO expert do when it comes OnPage SEO.It can do everything that is needed for a website to make it search engine friendly and fastly rank it.
10,00,000+ websites are using Yoast SEO WordPress plugin
It requires proper setting and if not done properly, it could damage you, for example, t may index duplicate content, deindex all of your site and can create other similar issues.
Let's configure the yoast plugin properly.Let's Start by learning how to use Yoast SEO wordpress plugin with best practices.
How To Install Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast Plugin Is Easy to install Like Other Plugins.
First Navigate to
⇒ Plugins ⇒ Add New ⇒ (Type in search bar) Yoast SEO ⇒ Install and activate Yoast SEO Plugin
You can also download the Yoast SEO plugin from Here and upload it manually by FTP or webhosting control panel.
How to Configure Yoast Wordpress Plugin For SEO.
Now You Have successfully installed Yoast SEO plugin and its ready for configuration.
Now Click Settings link of Yoast SEO plugin.Now It Will Show you like this.
Welcome
First Screen Shows the subscription for yoast.You can skip this step if you do not want to receive emails by yoast.
Click NEXT
Yoast Plugin Environment
Here At this point,You have to select an environment of your site, You will need to select one out of three.Normally I recommend to choose Production as we are configuring yoast for a live site.
Production(It Is a live site with real traffic)
Staging(This is a copy of a site for testing purposes)
Development(This site is locally for development purposes)
Site Type
Yoast Is asking for the type of your site.If your site is a blogger site then simply check Blog, If it is an ecommerce site then check for webshop, News site option is for news site.By this selection, Yoast will categorize your website accordingly.
Company Or person
This is for self explanatory option, If you are owner of a company, blog or non personal site then chose company instead choose person.Enter the name of your company
Upload any logo for your company
Social profiles
Enter the social profile URLs.Social profiles helps you for social appearance as it gives you exposure of social media and help you build a great branding of your site.
Click NEXT
Post Type Visibility
In this section we have three options for posts, pages and media.If post type is selected as hidden it will not index your posts and will not shown on search engines.By default posts and pages are on visible.
Multiple Authors
In This section you will specify that you site have single author or multiple authors for posting articles.
Google Search Console
Yoast allows you to attach your Google search console or web masters account.this helps you to track how your website is indexed in Google and other settings GWT offers.You can create account on search console.
Title Settings
Website Name
Enter You website's name you wish to appear in search results.Title Separator
Yoast helps you to select symbol to use as title separator.Click on the symbol you prefer.these separators appear between you site name and post's title.
Click NEXT
Success
Congrats you just completed the Yoast Plugin Configuration Wizard.Yoast WordPress SEO Settings
You have completed yoast plugin Configuration Now we will go deeper into yoast Settings.
Titles & Metas
Here under titles and metas, set how title, tags and meta description tags and also robots metas for post types and taxonomies settings.We will go each of the settings one by one.General settings
Here you can change some of your site's general settings.
Force rewrite titles: If Yoast settings do not appear on site like you set title of homepage template in yoast but on you site's homepage, if only sitename is appearing in title tag,it means theme or plugin is overriding the settings of SEO for your site.""If you Enable force rewrite titles it can fix the duplication of site name but it is not prefferd according to Yoast it can make you site slow.The solutio is that by going to
Appearance –> Editor –> Header.php
then delete all code between <title></title>, Then enter the code below.This will affects the SEO title structure for all the pages Now when You're Done Check your new SEO titles appear by hovering over the browser tab.
Home Page settings
In Homepage settings you will specify the title and meta description of your homepage.Title template is a way through which you specify hhow your title and meta description appear on your site.We will discuss how meta title and meta description are written in onPage SEO techniques.
You can set it statically for homepage, For post type, you can set a template so that each post have unique title and meta description.The akready defined title templates are good to go.Enter your site's discription and click Save Changes.
Post Types settings
Yoast provides the fascility to set your own post type title template such as page, post attachments and revisions.
WordPress Post Types
Post (Post Type: ‘post’)
Page (Post Type: ‘page’)
Attachment (Post Type: ‘attachment’)
Revision (Post Type: ‘revision’)
Navigation menu (Post Type: ‘nav_menu_item’)
You can use above tags in the image and write down unique title for each post you write.these tags will bring your post title as your meta title and %%excerpt%% will auto create your meta description tag from your content.These are the recommended settings for post Types meta templates.
Meta Robots let you select between index (Search Engines can index your content) and noindex( Stop search Engines to crawl and index your content).
XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps are very helpful.these sitemaps inform search engines about your content.It is like a map which contains all the pages and contents of your site and this map is ready for search engine crawlers like Googlebot.This will helps the search engine to know about the website's organization.
Yoast SEO lets you to add XML sitemaps.Enable the XML sitemap functionality.You do not need to generate XML sitemap manually Yoast automatically generates it for you.
Under Posts types Tab you can select the things which you want to appear in your sitemaps.Mean if you do not want the media on your site in your sitemap just click Not in Sitemap option.
You can also remove any of your posts from sitemap uusing "Exclude posts"Tab.Enter the post id in the textbox below and use comma in case of multiple posts.
Categories, Tags and other taxonomies of your Wordpress site can be customized for the sitemap under Taxonomies Tab.This is the most important part of Yoast And needs to be configured Properly.
Taxonomies Configuration
Categories:Take a look at the picture given below.Title template must require term_title and page.And Meta Description template acquire category_description.Meta Robots is selected as index and yoast meta box is high.
Tags:
Do the same with tags as done with categories previously.
Tags Should be no index or index? That's a very hot discussion that never ended.
So let me type this with my best practise i am using since years and now what i learnt from my experience.
1.You want to rank for more and more keywords?
If you wish to rank for more keywords then set the tags indexing status on and tags will rank for you otherwise no.Do not create so many tags per post otherwise google will consider it as keyword stuffing and your site will get penalized.Make few tags that can be used as sub categories. You can easily find tags related to your post by using Google suggest aka Google instant.So, I would recommend to use tags as sub categories and rank them to get more visits.Add unique titile and unique description to each tag so it will gets some value and can be ranked in Google Search Engine Result Page.This method works very well and is tested by me.
Format:
Now enable the format-based archives and title template as should be %%term_title%% %%page%% like shown in pic below.while on the noindex in meta robots.
https://tnandla.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Yoast-Format.png
If you want to disable any unnecessary archives.If you think that you have made any custom taxonomy, you may set meta robots for format-based archives as index.
Archives Configuration
There are some simple settings that you have to do properly in archives too.Just switch on Disabled in Author Archives and noindex in meta robots.
Date Archives:
Date Archives' title format must contain date, page, sep and sitname while turn on the catch of "Disbaled" in Date-Bared-Archive and "noindex" in Meta Robots.
Special Pages:
Seek page will have search query and page name in it. Not Found page can have content of your decision, I picked to compose Page not discovered separator and after that site's name.
Breadcrumbs (Advanced)
Breadcrumbs give your leverage in query items. Breadcrumbs, as the name proposes give a brief trail or way of the page you are on. For instance
Now click the enabled button and breadcrumbs will be enabled for your site.You can set the separator between breadcrumbs and other options here.You can also Bold the last page in the breadcrumbs hierarchy which will be the page you are on.
Critical: Simply exchanging breadcrumbs on won't initiate the breadcrumbs on your site. You will even now need to adjust your topic's layout to show it on your site. You can take after this guide on the most proficient method to do it:https://kb.yoast.com/kb/implement-wordpress-seo-breadcrumbs/
Permalinks (Advanced)
To begin with you need to choose SEO benevolent permalink structure in WordPress settings since this component of Yoast gives Add on's to the permalink structure you have chosen in wordpress settings. So don't get confounded amongst WordPress and Yoast permalinks settings.
On the off chance that you need to expel the default "/class/" from your URL you can choose REMOVE under change URL's. It will reject that part from the URL of your classes and that is the thing that looks decent really.
Caution: Doing this can in some cases make struggle between page URL's and classification URL's.
Connections to the posts can be gotten to utilizing their own particular URLs however in the event that you divert those presents on parent post then that will divert them to the post they are appended to.
Caution: If you don't choose this alternative and you utilize exhibitions on your webpage may bring about crippling Adsense on your site as connection pages contains no substance so Google Adsense debilitates such locales
The following choice will help you expel the stopwords ( of, for and so forth ) from your URL. A few people can't help contradicting Yoast and leave this alternative unselected as empowering this component may wind up in some contention with different modules or topic.
Evacuate the ?replytocom factors is to expel or keep ?replytocom variable from the remark connections to debilitate joins for clients that have JavaScript incapacitated. This is utilized to build the effectiveness of slithers uncommonly for a site with gigantic number of remarks.
We encourage to overlook you the "Divert appalling URLs to clean permalinks" choice.
Ready: This can bring about issues in your modules.
Click Save Changes.
Yoast SEO For Post Customization
You can now see a Yoast SEO Box below every post and page editor which helps you customize your post to be SEO friendly.
Under the focus keyword enter the keyword you want this post to rank for.then click edit snippet.
Website optimization title will the title layout which we utilized amid the setting of our Yoast module. Enter your Meta Description about the post which will simply be the discretionary synopsis of your post. And after that Close the snipper editorial manager. In the wake of giving the concentration catchphrases Yoast will give you bits of knowledge or recommendations to your post under the Page Analysis Tab. The recommendations will resemble this.
Follow the instructions generated by this tab to improve the visibility of your post in search engines. These are very straightforward but important things just read them carefully and implement the suggestion. Usually this analysis helps a lot but remember don’t over optimize the article so that i losses its true meaning.
Download Yoast SEO WordPress Settings
It was a long guide of Yoast design, even I have tired of understanding it so let me make it simple for you. I've send out yoast search engine optimization settings for you so you can download it and import it on your site. This will scarcely take your 120 seconds. Glad?https://goo.gl/7nZuOH
How to Import Yoast SEO Settings?
Go to Yoast SEO Settings Page > Tools > Import > Choose File (Select file you just downloaded) > Import Settings.
OR
Go to this URL: yourwordpresswebsite/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_tools&tool=import-export
