Hello, friends! Welcome to my WordPress blog to learn with me the ins and outs of the popular WordPress platform. Matt Cutts, Google’s lead spam and optimization specialist, said that WordPress is a great CMS for getting your site on the search engines. You, ladies and gentlemen, made the right choice by deciding to create your project on WordPress. Today we have an important topic – the correct configuration of the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.
It’s time to talk about the SEO optimization of your WordPress blog/site. At different times, several plugins had to be used for these purposes.
For Examples, are Platinum SEO, All in One SEO Pack, Breadcrumb NavXT, and others. I present to you the best SEO plugin in the universe – Yoast SEO.
Time does not stand still and instead of good plugins, even better ones appear. One such plugin that has emerged is Yoast SEO for a WordPress site (the old name is WordPress SEO by Yoast). One of the best SEO plugins will now take care of all the tasks of optimizing your website. Post updated.
WordPress Yoast SEO plugin is an automatic creation of XML Sitemaps (sitemap) for Google, Bing, and Yandex search engines; the ability to verify your site for the webmaster’s office (will add a meta – verification tag to your home page).
Setting up the display of your site in search results (setting the SEO title and Meta description; “Breadcrumbs” for your blog; setting up an RSS feed, editing robots.txt and htaccess files directly from the administrative panel.
Page analysis when writing an article and much more other, which will be discussed below reading, friends, how to set up the Yoast plugin?
Yoast SEO is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin. The plugin Installed by more than 5 million users, wow! updated very often, in my opinion, more often than the others installed by me.
Fellows, improve your WordPress SEO: improve your content quality and get a fully optimized WordPress site with the Yoast SEO plugin. The module is installed as usual, from the WP admin panel, in the standard way.
Section Plugins – Add new. In the plugin search field, enter SEO Yoast, the list of plugins will be the first. Click Install:
Further, after successful installation and activation of the plugin, a new section will appear in the admin panel – SEO and subsections.
Yoast SEO Settings
What SEO plugin settings can you make? Naturally, we go from the very beginning: click General. Tab Console. You should see a notification about the start of the Yoast SEO setup wizard, as well as problems with your site and notifications (if any) that you will fix when setting up the plugin. Let’s first do the initial SEO settings. Click the link: Get started quickly with the Yoast SEO Setup Wizard!
After that, a special page will open in a new browser tab where the plugin will help you set up SEO for the needs of your site!
Go through all 10 steps, marking the settings you need. Then return to your admin panel and continue with the settings. The next tab is Opportunities. Yoast SEO offers many different services. You can activate/deactivate some of them below. Click on the question mark for more information about the service:
Enable everything, though, everyone should decide for themselves, and by default, all services are enabled.
Yoast SEO Sitemap (Sitemap XML)
Here, many people ask how to include a sitemap XML sitemap for search engines in Yoast SEO? Here, it turns on. It also says in English letters: XML Sitemap – Include the XML Sitemap files that Yoast SEO generates.
XML sitemap
An XML sitemap (sitemap.xml) tells search engines which pages of your site to index when they were last updated, how often they are updated, and how important they are relative to other pages on the site.
The sitemap.xml file can help crawlers find all the pages on your site and correctly determine the importance of the pages. To tell search engines the location of the sitemap.xml file, you need to specify the file URL in webmaster tools (Google Search Console, Yandex. Webmaster, or Bing Webmaster Tools) and add a link to the map in robots.txt.
You can even view it right away (not configured yet) by pressing ? and the corresponding link. And later on, you can find your XML sitemap right here:
I opened it, copied the link to the map and added it to the webmaster (after setting it up). The map link in Yoast SEO will be https://your_site/sitemap_index.xml And it looks like this:
It is recommended to create an XML sitemap from the very beginning, once you have written a few posts on your WordPress site.
Webmaster Tools
Use the following blocks to verify your site in different search engines. This setting will add a verification meta tag to your home page. This is when the search engines in the webmaster require you to confirm the rights to the site. You get meta tags and insert the digital part into the required fields.
Don’t forget to save all changes – the blue button.
Go to the page: Display in search results, General tab.
Here, select the header separator. It will be shown between your post title and the site title. The characters will appear in the search results. And be sure to specify the SEO title for your site, and also, importantly, the meta description of the main page of the WordPress site.
A meta description is the meta description of the site page. The description meta tag, unlike meta keywords, is an effective and quite effective way to influence the presentation of a site in search results.
The meta-name description content is used when generating a snippet to describe the site in search.
Social settings
These are the image, title and description used when a link to your homepage is shared on social media.
You can define a title and description for the main page of the site as you wish.
Then there is the Content Types tab. From this moment, the setup of the xml sitemap in Yoast SEO begins. It used to be different, now it’s much clearer and easier. Now it all comes down to answering a simple question: Do you want this or that to appear in search engines (include in the sitemap or not)?
Sitemap XML Yoast SEO Setup
The settings on this page allow you to specify how the default search result will look for any type of content. You can choose what type of content will appear in the search results and the default description option. You can make individual settings in the relevant sections of Yoast SEO in order to make your content available for indexing by search robots.
For example, by answering “Yes” to the “Show posts in search results” question in the post settings, you will ensure that your articles will appear in the XML sitemap, and therefore in search results.
Include posts and pages in the XML sitemap, and the date however you want.
You can exclude individual posts from the XML sitemap in the Yoast SEO meta box under the post editor. By clicking on the gear and select the one you need.
Redirect attachment URLs to attachment file – enable Yes. If you upload a media file (such as an image or video), WordPress not only saves your media file but also generates a URL for it. Pages with these URLs are almost empty: they only have your media and possibly a title (if you added one). For this reason, if you never use these URLs, it’s best to deactivate them and redirect them to the media object itself.
In the Taxonomy tab, you need to choose: to include in the sitemap XML or not – categories, tags, and archives by format? Categories can be added to the map. As for the labels, I still have not found an answer to whether they are needed on the map or not. Decide for yourself.
If you want Google, Yandex and other search engines to find your XML sitemap faster, you need to add it in the PS webmaster.
The next tab is Archives.
There is a hint about the archives: If you run your personal blog, the author’s archive will completely match the home page. Called the duplicate content problem. If this is your situation, you can either turn it off (it will redirect to the home page) or add noindex, follow the link to exclude it from search results.
Please note that archive links may still have their way out of your theme and you will need to remove them individually. An archive by date can also appear as duplicate content in some cases.
If your theme does not have breadcrumbs, then you can customize them – Tab – Breadcrumbs, and then embed the code in your template.
How to add breadcrumbs from Yoast to the topic, I told you here a long time ago.
RSS feed settings. RSS tab: This feature will automatically add content to the RSS feed, you can add links to your site in each entry, protecting the content from automatic aggregators, and indicating the source address to search engines. Whether you need it or not, decide for yourself. And I will go further.
It’s good that the plugin is in Russian and settings with hints (click on the question mark), which makes it easier for us to configure the module.
The next subsection of the plugin is the Search Console. You can connect the plugin to Google Search Console so you can track how Google indexes your site. By giving Yoast SEO access to your Search Console account, you can see and fix crawl errors right from the plugin!
And now we will look into the subsection Social networks – tab – Accounts. List your social media profiles. Search engines know which social media profiles linked to your site. Enter links, save changes and go to the Facebook tab.
Enable Open Graph metadata if you want Facebook and other social networks to display images and a snippet of text in the preview if someone shares a link to your site. That is, it is beautiful to post/share on social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks.
Set up other social networks according to the plugin’s prompts. For what and how to set up Open Graph, read the instructions here.
And lastly, settings. Subsection – Yoast SEO Tools:
Import and Export – Import settings from other SEO plugins and export settings for reuse on (another) blog.
File Editor – This tool allows you to quickly edit your SEO-critical files like robots.txt and .htaccess (if available).
Group Editor – This tool will allow you to quickly change the titles and descriptions of your posts and pages without editing individual pages.
Text links counter.
Finished with the settings. Now how to use the Yoast SEO plugin.
When creating a new post, the SEO Plugin adds useful features under the post editor. Snippet – how the fragment of the post will look in the search results.
The description is important for users who view the issue. Most of them focus on it when choosing where to click. Fill in the Description or not – it’s up to you. On the one hand, the search engine itself can choose the text for the snippet, and ignore the filled meta tag. But on the other hand, there are chances that your good conversion text with the right information will end up in the snippet, so you can fill in the meta tags and get this chance.
Change the snippet as you need. Google spokesperson John Mueller said this about the recommended Description length:
“There is no fixed length. Ideally, aim for them to be unique, compelling, and useful.”
John Mueller
The use of keywords in the Description will not affect the positions, but will be bold in the text of the snippet and may attract attention.
The feature of the plugin is the keyword, it will check it in the title of the article; page title; Page URL; content in the meta description.
Click on the Eye icon (highlight the result in the text) and the plugin shows/highlights on the page the places for correction. Here, perhaps, we will end our story at this point. Learn, use, improve SEO, and in the first place in the issue – Welcome.
Modules such as Breadcrumb NavXT, Category SEO Meta Tags. Google XML Sitemaps and others. Personally, I have already switched to WordPress SEO Yoast. Which is what I wish you. Just for us, beginners and not only, but that’s also it.
P.S. The popular WordPress plugin Yoast SEO has released an update that allows you to properly implement Schema.org markup.
What sets this proposal apart from other available options is that it solves two problems:
Simplifies markup implementation;
Combines disparate markup generated by most Schema implementations and forms a nested structure.
Finally
Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack (properly configured) are some of the best SEO plugins out there. Choose based on personal preferences, but do not forget that you cannot install both plugins on your resource (not recommended). NEW: A new SEO plugin, Rank Math, is gaining popularity right now, take a closer look at it.
I switched from Yoast SEO to it. There, all the features that are only in paid plugins are completely free.
And I have everything on it. There will be questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments. Good luck.
