Setup basic SEO with Yoast SEO plugin
What is Yoast SEO?
One of the popular WordPress SEO plugin to optimize your website to make it search engine-friendly
Why Yoast SEO?
- Get more visitors from search engines
- Help to improve your website ranking in search engines
- Help search engine optimization
- Control title and meta description
- Manage sitemap
Add Yoast SEO
- Go to Plugins > Add New
- Search for Yoast SEO
- Install and Activate the plugin
Set up Yoast SEO
General
Dashboard
You will see
- Problems – issue detected that affect your site SEO
- Notifications – all notification from Yoast SEO plugin
Features
You can enable or disable each of the feature below
- SEO analysis – offer suggestion to improve SEO of your text
- Readability analysis – offer suggestion to improve structure and style of your text
- Cornerstone content – mark and filter cornerstone content on your site
- Text link counter – improve your site structure
- XML sitemaps – enable XML sitemaps that Yoast SEO generate
- Ryte integration – check weekly if site is index by search engine and receive notification from Yoast SEO
- Admin bar menu – contain useful links to third party tools for analyze page and easier for you to see new notification
Webmaster Tools
Allow you to verify your site with Webmaster tools of Baidu, Bing, Google (Google Search Console) and Yandex.
It gives you feedback on how your site is doing in the search results and tells how search engines perceive your site.
Search Appearance
General
Allow you to edit
- Title separator (choose symbol to use as separator)
- Home page & front page (set SEO title and meta description)
- Knowledge Graph & Schema.org (determine what your site will look like)
Choose whether site represent an organization or a person
Content Types
Can choose whether want each of the content to show up in search results
Media
Can choose whether want to redirect attachment URL to attachment itself
Taxonomies
Can choose whether want search engine to display different types of taxonomies in search results
Can change SEO title and meta description
Archives
Can choose whether to display different types of archives in search results
Breadcrumbs
Enable breadcrumb to add to your site
Take note:
In order for the parent category to occur in breadcrumb, remember to set the parent page for the child page.
- Edit your child page
- Look for Page Attributes section at right sidebar
- Select parent page from dropdown list
- Click View page on top and you can see breadcrumb with parent category
RSS
Add link back to your site at end of blog post
Show search engine the original source and make sure you show up as first result for your own content
Social
Accounts
If you choose organization in search appearance, can fill in your organization social profiles
If you choose person in search appearance, it is disabled
Can choose to add Open Graph meta data (allow user share web page on Facebook)
If Enable, preview with images and text excerpt is displayed
Twitter also use Open Graph meta data so keep Add Open Graph meta data enabled
Can choose to add Twitter card meta data
Pinterest also use Open Graph meta data so keep Add Open Graph meta data enabled
Tools
Use with caution as may cause problems if no experience
Import and Export – import settings from other SEO plugins and export your settings for re-use
File editor – quickly change important file for SEO (eg. robots.txt)
Bulk editor – quickly change title and description of posts and pages without go to each page editor
Text link counter – count links in your text
Optimize page using Yoast SEO
- Edit one of your website page
- Scroll down the page and you will see Yoast SEO metabox
- Add your Focus keyphrase
Recommend to add keyword that people normally will enter in search engine - Click Edit snippet
Snippet editor display - Add SEO title, Slug and Meta description for this page
Look thoroughly problems that stated in SEO analysis and readability analysis report
Try your best to turn your problems to good results
It is best when all the color turn green