When we talk about WordPress plugins for SEO, a name “Yoast SEO” always comes to mind. This plugin is one of the best known within the WordPress repository, whether you are an SEO professional, an amateur or an entrepreneur. Given its importance, today we bring you a complete guide in which we show you what it is and how to configure the Yoast SEO plugin from 0 to 100. Let’s get down to business!
What is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin for SEO that allows us to make a wide variety of adjustments and configurations that, a priori, help us improve the positioning of our website. I say “a priori” because a bad configuration of Yoast SEO can make your positioning worse or not be what it could be.
Whenever we install a plugin we must take into account a series of basic requirements and the Yoast SEO plugin meets all of them:
- It is a plugin that is constantly updated and is in continuous improvement.
- It has more than 5 million active installations.
- It has more than 25,000 ratings and has a rating of 4.9 ⭐
** It is considered by many to be the best WordPress plugin for SEO for a reason.
What can we do with Yoast SEO?
Thanks to Yoast SEO, we can activate or deactivate a series of features, in a very visual way, depending on the needs and characteristics of the website.
We can also carry out certain actions, such as:
- Modify the SEO title and meta descriptionsimproving the appearance of a website in search results.
- check with a simple SEO optimization checklist of a page for a certain keyword(s).
- Create and optimize some important files for SEO such as the sitemap.xml or the robots.txt.
- Tell search engines which pages to index or which not.
How to install the Yoast SEO plugin?
Installing Yoast SEO on a web page is very simple. To do this you must do the following:
1. Go inside the back-end of your WordPress.
2. Look for the plugins section in the left sidebar. Once the drop-down appears, click on “add new”.
3. Use the plugin search engine and enter “Yoast SEO”. You have to see an image similar to the one I leave you at the end of the list *
4. Click on install and then on activate.
Once you’ve done all these steps, it’s time to start setting up Yoast SEO for WordPress.
How to configure the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress?
Once you have installed and activated Yoast SEO in WordPress, a new section will appear in the WordPress sidebar called “SEO”. It is here where you will be able to make all the configurations of the plugin.
Once you hover over it, you will see that the 5 sections that make up Yoast SEO appear: General, Appearance in the search engine, Search Console, Social and Tools. Let’s see each of them:
Yoast SEO > General
This is the first section where you can make a basic configuration of the options included in the Yoast SEO plugin.
In this section we find 3 tabs:
1. Desk
In this section there is nothing to configure for the Yoast SEO plugin, since its function is to show plugin warnings and notifications. Here what you should do is check it from time to time in case you have any problem or notice.
2. Features
This is the first section where we can configure Yoast SEO, in this case we are configuring the options of the plugin itself. Here we explain one by one what they are for:
SEO analysis
By checking this option, the Yoast SEO plugin will offer us suggestions when it comes to improving the SEO of our text.
Readability Analysis
This will recommend actions to improve the style and structure of the text.
essential content
This box, although it should be checked, will not have a direct impact on the SEO of your website. It allows you to mark and filter the most important content on your website and thanks to this Yoast SEO will set stricter guidelines for that article or page.
Text link counter
By activating this, the plugin will notify us of the number of internal and external links that we have on each page. This becomes a very useful functionality to be able to optimize the internal functions of our site.
XML sitemap
This function will cause Yoast SEO itself to automatically generate a sitemap.xml of your website called Yoast SEO Sitemap. With this file you will indicate to Google which are the pages that you want it to track.
I leave you this in case you want more information regarding this file.
Integration with Ryte
By checking this option, the “Ryte” tool will be able to check daily if your site is still indexed in search engines and will notify you when it is not.
The Yoast SEO for WordPress admin bar menu contains useful links to third-party tools to analyze pages and make it easy for you to see if you have new notices.
Security: No advanced settings for authors
This option should be checked to prevent the authors of your website’s content from having access to advanced options, such as removing entries from search results or changing the canonical tag, among others. These privileges should only be held by the editors and administrators of our site.
Recommended configuration
Leave everything you are going to use activated.
- If you don’t use Ryte, disable this option.
- If you generate the Sitemap manually or with another plugin, disable this option.
3.Webmaster tools
In this tab of the Yoast SEO plugin we can leave nothing configured if we verify Google through Google Search Console. This verification is not going to have direct effects on the SEO of our website, but rather the use of this tool seems essential to carry out our day-to-day tasks.
It will also offer us the option to verify different search engines, everything will depend on which search engines you want to index your website. Today we know that Google is the one that takes almost all of the cake in most countries of the world.
Yoast SEO > Appearance in the search engine
This section, together with the tools section, are the most important in Yoast SEO and you must pay great attention and care to each of the configurations that are made, since they can have a significant impact on the positioning of your website.
Within the “Appearance in the search engine” section we can find 7 tabs that we explain below:
1.Overall
In this tab we have to put data about the page, such as:
- Company name: Here you must put the name of the company or the person that the blog is about.
- Logo: Image you use for the brand.
- Company or person: If you are a company, select “company”. Otherwise, select “person”.
Title separator: In this section you can select the symbol with which you will separate the title of your page from the specific title of each URL.
Ex: “How to configure Yoast SEO for WordPress? –”
In this way, every time we publish a page, “- ” will appear followed by the title that we have given to said page.
2. Types of content
This section is essential, since here we can make great options and most of the problems are usually there. Specifically, we can make 3 great options:
- Choose what content we want to be indexed by Google, that is, to appear in the search results.
- Define what elements we want to appear by default in the SEO title.
- Define by default what elements we want to appear in the meta description.
We have to bear in mind that this section is usually very particular and there may be more or fewer configuration options depending on the template and the plugins you have installed. To make a correct configuration of this section you must ask yourself a question: What am I working on at the SEO level?
I put a example:
I have an online store with the following options:
- Tickets
- pages
- Products
- FAQ’s
- revolution slider
- Templates
Once you have decided what types of content you want to appear on Google, it is time to modify the generic way in which the SEO title and meta description are displayed.
By default, the SEO title is made up of the elements Title, Page, Separator and Site Title. Instead, the meta description usually comes empty.
Our advice is that you only leave “Title” in the SEO title and leave the meta description empty to make an individual optimization on each page. In order to do so, you must check the box “show Yoast SEO meta box” so that within each content that we edit, the Yoast SEO configuration box appears, which will allow us to easily customize the titles and meta descriptions.
3. Media
Rarely do you find a page where SEO positioning by images is very important. Therefore, the most common option will be to leave the option marked “Yes” which comes by default. In this way, empty content URLs generated when uploading an image or video to WordPress are redirected to the image or video itself.
4. Taxonomies
Taxonomies are the different groups of entries or links. WordPress has some default taxonomies like for example “categories” or “tags” among other. Here we will have the same options that appear in the “content types” tab, but for the different taxonomies that our website has.
The most common configuration of the taxonomies section is to mark everything or almost everything as no-index, or what is the same, “do not show in search engines”. Although this may vary depending on your website and whether or not you work on these sections for SEO.
5. Files
In this configuration tab of the Yoast SEO plugin, different options appear on the author files, by dates and special pages such as the .
These files are rarely useful for SEO and are often a common source of duplicate content on many sites. Therefore, the configuration that we usually do for our clients is the following:
Author files: “Do not show in search results” and in the event that it is only one person who writes or the person who writes is irrelevant, we recommend deactivating this option.
Archives by dates: Just like author archives in Yoast SEO, it’s best to disable them, as long as it’s not a news website.
Special pages: In this section of Yoast we usually leave everything as it comes by default.
6. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a website navigation technique that consists of a line of text indicating the route followed and the way to return. This allows the user to know the path of its location in directories and subdirectories, and navigate through it easily.
In other words, they serve to keep the user informed of their location within the hierarchical structure of the website.
They would look like this: Home > Page Level 1 > Page Level 2 > … > Current Page.
That said, the plugin…
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