The most detailed guide on how to use the Yoast SEO plugin

Over a million installs.

Rating 4.5.

Those are the numbers that confirm the popularity of Yoast SEO .

Without a doubt, Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin out there.

For me personally, Yoast SEO is always the plugin on the list of must-install plugins for every WordPress site.

However, I find the Yoast SEO configuration section can make you, who are new to WordPress, overwhelmed. How to best configure Yoast SEO?

With this rather long and meticulous article, I will help you answer that question. Besides, I also give a lot of tips to get the most out of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Come on, let’s get started.

How to install and set up Yoast SEO

How to install Yoast SEO plugin is the same as other regular WordPress plugins. Go to Plugins -> Add New and type ‘Word Press SEO’ in the search box. Yoast SEO will appear at the top of the results. Click Install, then Activate as soon as the installation is finished.

Now I will explain in detail the settings in Yoast SEO.

In terms of configuration, Yoast SEO is divided into two parts: global settings or site-wide configuration, and local settings. The settings in the global settings will apply to the entire website. Local settings are the local settings you apply to each Page or Post.

First we look at the configuration for the entire site. With the right configuration you will have a better chance of improving your search results ranking.

1. General Settings (General Settings)

General

• Tour : Click Start Tour will help you quickly browse the features of Yoast SEO.
• Credits : If you’re curious who’s behind Yoast SEO, click this button to see.
• Restore Default Settings : Helps you restore Yoast SEO to its original default settings.

Your Info

• Website Name : By default, Google will use the site name of your website (you configure Settings -> General) to display in search results. Here, you can change the site name and an alternate name you want Google to consider displaying.
• Company or person : This information will be used as part of Google’s Knowledge Graph. The information you provide you here usually appears on the right hand side when users search for your brand.

Webmaster Tools

Normally, you go to the homepage of Webmaster Tools to authenticate after building the website. So you can skip this part.

Security

• Advanced part of the Yoast SEO meta box : If your website has multiple authors, you can consider disabling this option. Because you don’t want anyone to be able to change the SEO related settings for your site.

2. Section Titles & Metas

Now let’s move on to the Titles & Metas section. Here you configure how the content shows up in search results.

General

• Title Speparator : choose the separator character for your page title. This part is purely up to your preference.

The two options below you keep as they are. This is an important feature of Yoast SEO.

Homepage

Here and a few other configuration screens, you can use a number of variables to set the title format. To see a list of all the variables you can use, you can go to the Help section.

• Title Template : Here you set the title format for the homepage. The default setting is Ok.
• Meta Description Template : You provide a template for your homepage meta description. This description will be displayed below the URL in search results.

Post Types

Here you will configure the title format and description information for Post, Page, Media or any custom Post type.

• Meta Robots : If you want certain parts of your website to be indexed by search engines, leave them indexed, otherwise noindex. In general, those that have no SEO value should be left with noindex. For example, when you use the ThirstyAffiliates plugin to manage affiliate links, the plugin will create a post style for each affiliate link. With this type of post you should prevent the search engine from indexing.

• Date in Snippet Preview : By default, the date will not appear in the search results of the search engines. However, if you own a news website, you may want the date to appear.
• Yoast Meta Box : If any Post type you do not want to configure Yoast SEO, you can hide Yoast Meta Box to make the interface more compact

Regarding the title, by default the name of the post follows the name of your website. Such a configuration is fine. Just remember not to index content types you don’t want to appear in the search results. For example, affiliate link as I mentioned above.

Taxonomies

Taxonomies is the term in WordPress to refer to a function that categorizes post types. By default we have 2 most basic taxonomy that is Tag, and Category.

Like Post Types, the header setting is fine. As for the indexing part, I personally do not index the Taxonomies section to limit duplicate content.

Archives

The most important part of this section is that you must determine which sections should be indexed.

• Author Archive : You own a website of which only you are the author. So don’t index this section to avoid duplicate content.
• Date Archive : This section is not valid for search engines. So you let noindex.
• Special Page : This section will not appear in search results. Edit the title if you like.

Other

This part is not very important, you keep the default settings.

3. Social section

Now, let’s move on to the settings for the social network. These days social media plays an important role in increasing the SEO value of your website. So don’t skip this part.

Accounts

On this screen, you enter your social network account. This helps Google know the social networking sites you offer are relevant to your site. As a result, they will appear in search results when users search for your brand.

You can configure details for each social network in the tabs Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+. These configurations help your content show up best when shared on social networks

4. Section XML-Sitemaps

Sitemaps are important information for search engines. It makes it easy for search engines to index your site.

General

This section ensures that you have enabled the XML sitemap functionality. The plugin will do the rest like automatically updating the sitemap every time you have new content.

One thing you should do here. Get the XML sitemap link by clicking XML Sitemap. Then you register the Sitemap URL with Webmaster Tools.

One point to note is that you should not use many plugins with the function of creating sitemaps. This makes it difficult for search engines to index your site.

Post Types

You configure which post types do not have a sitemap. Post types that have no SEO value, you leave out of the sitemap. The general rule is: if you set noindex in the Post Types section of Titles & Metas (mentioned above), then in this section you remove that post type from the sitemap.

Excluded Posts

Here, you remove individual posts from the sitemap by entering the post IDs separated by commas.

Taxonomies

You configure as post types

5. Advanced section

This is the advanced configuration section. You probably don’t need further editing. But it’s still worth it if you understand the configurations here.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the part of the link that links to the current content that appears above the content title, as shown below:

The use of breadcrumbs is just a matter of preference. Some themes already have breadcrumbs like the beginner theme that toolofblogger is using

Permalinks

• Strip Category Base : By default, the path when you click on a category on a WordPress site, contains ‘/category/’. You can drop ‘/category/’ with this option. But it’s best to keep it that way.
• Redirect Attachments : Digital files such as photos and videos are stored as posts. That is, they have their own path. When users find them in Google search results and click on the link, they will be taken to the original image page. If you choose to redirect, they will take them to the post they were attached to. You should choose redirect if your website has too many images. This will reduce the chances of having a lot of low-quality content on your site.
• Stop words in slugs : This section works for English sites. It helps you to make URLs more compact by removing stopwords in URLs like ‘a’, ‘the’ and so on.
• Remove the ‘replytocom’ variable : This option is important when you have a website with a large amount of comments. Because it can increase the indexing efficiency of search engines.
• Redirect ugly URLs to clean permalink : You keep it as default.

RSS

This section allows you to add content at the top or bottom of the RSS feed. It helps search engines identify you as the author of the article. All settings here are fine.

6. Tools

Yoast SEO provides you with the following useful tools:

• Bulk Editor: Helps you quickly change the post title and description of your multiple posts and pages, instead of editing them one by one. This saves a lot of time when you install the plugin on a site that already has a lot of content.
• File Editor : Directly edit important files like robots.txt and .htaccess. Normally to edit these files you have to access them using FTP.
• Import/Export : Import settings from other SEO plugins and export settings for reuse on other blogs.

How to use Yoast SEO

In this section, I will cover how to use Yoast SEO.

In general, Yoast SEO helps you with 3 things: keyword research, page analysis, and most importantly, creating SEO optimized content.

1. Keyword Research

When installing and activating the plugin, Yoast SEO adds a new section on the Admin Bar. Here you will find a subsection called keyword research. In fact, it’s just a link to two Google keyword research tools including Google Keyword Planner and Google Trend. And another keyword research tool is SEO Book Keyword Tool.

2. Page Analysis

Page Analysis is also located in the Admin Bar section. But it is only visible when you view a page on the front-end. Like the keyword research section, Yoast SEO also links to external applications for page analysis. This saves you time instead of copying the URL and pasting it into external applications.

3. Create content

This is the main function of Yoast SEO, helping you create SEO optimized content. Once installed, you will see a box named Yoast SEO (Yoast Seo Meta box) at the bottom of the editing screen:

This pane has multiple tabs that give you control over different parts of the content

• Content optimization including readability analysis, keyword optimization and other page analytics
• Configuration for social networks
• Advanced configuration

We will go into detail about each part.

Snippet Review

As you can guess, this section is the information that will be displayed in the search results of the search engine. Yoast SEO will give you a visual view of how your article will be displayed in the eyes of search engines.

In addition, Yoast SEO has a status bar with changing colors, letting you know the SEO results for partial modifications. For example, you can’t remember how many words for the meta description is good. You just need to type until the blue status bar is fine.

SEO title

You can provide a different title for search engines. This happens when you have a very long post title. Search engines are limited in displaying titles. And long titles are not good for SEO.

In addition, users cannot see all the article titles in the search results. From there they will not know if your page really contains the information they are looking for.

Therefore, you need to shorten to the title to create a version of the title for the search engines. However, this shortening must ensure to show the topic of your article. That’s how it attracts users to click on your article on the search results.

Meta Description

You should provide a description of the article. If you don’t enter, Google may randomly pick up a portion of the article as the description, usually the header. Such information will not attract users to click on the article when searching in Google.

In general, you should invest time to have an attractive meta description. That way you can improve the CRT rate (post click rate / number of times the article is seen through search results).

Sl ug

The URL section of the article. One tip in this section is that you keep the slug as short as possible. Ideally, you only need the keyword that the article targets. For example, if you have an article you want to rank high for the keyword ‘baking book’, your slug just needs to be yoursitename.com/sach-lamb-banh. This helps Google immediately understand the topic of the article.

Focus Keyword

This is the target keyword that you want to rank for the highest on Google. Providing target keywords helps Yoast SEO analyze if your page is optimized for that keyword. You will see the results through colors and notices in the title of the Keyword:name-keyword-tab or the Publish area.

Page Analysis

Here you will see Yoast SEO page analysis results for your target keyword. Depending on the results, you re-edit your article for optimization.

But remember that you write content for readers first, then search engines. Search engines will reward the article that best serves readers. So don’t over-optimize here. Regarding on-page SEO, you just need to meet a few of the following criteria to be fine:

• The target keyword should be as close to the beginning of the article title as possible.
• The target keyword should appear in the first 100 words of the article. No need to optimize for keyword density. Just repeating the keyword a few times at the beginning, body, and end of the article is fine.
• There are keywords in the H2 tag, and the alt tag of the image. But this has to look natural or you could be penalized for keyword stuffing.

Advanced

This part you do not need to edit anything. Because all the configuration is here, you should set it up in Global Settings as instructed above. But if you want to have a separate setting for the post, change it here.

I will explain each item:

• Meta Robots Index : Determines whether a post or page should be indexed by search engines.
• Meta Robots Follow : Decides whether the engine should continue to follow the links in the article or not.
• Meta Robots Advanced : this section covers some meta tags, not important so don’t do any research. 
• Canonical UR L : You use this feature when you want to republish content that is already somewhere on the web. Here you will enter the original post URL to avoid the risk of being penalized for duplicate content

Social

This section helps you set up the title, description, and profile picture when sharing posts on Facebook or Twitter. Because each social network has its own standards, here you can optimize posts for each different social network.

Readability

This section helps to check the readability of your article. Yoast SEO will check the length of each paragraph, each sentence, the number of words per title, and each sentence. If your writing is in English, there will be more points for readability and the use of transition word, passive voice. This section helps me a lot for my English blogs.

Epilogue

Yoast SEO is an extremely powerful plugin. With the plugin in hand, you can control dozens of important settings for your website. From title format, indexing rules, how to appear in search results.

Besides, creating SEO-optimized content has never been easier. The page analysis is extremely detailed and intuitive. Looking at it, you immediately know which part of the article has not been optimized for SEO. You don’t need to guess in page optimization.

Yoast SEO certainly doesn’t get you to the first place in Google’s search results. But using Yoast SEO will keep your website SEO plan on track.

Honestly, it’s hard to do technical on-page SEO without this plugin.

Are you using Yoast SEO or not? If so, please share your experience in the comments below.