How to configure Yoast SEO? Best WordPress SEO Plugin

koporc February 16, 2016 Tutorials & Guides, Wordpress No Comments

WordPress is the most popular CMS on planet. It is easy to use and can be used to create blogs, sites or even web shops. Duo to the large community there are many free and paid plugins that can do about anything you can imagine. Installing wordpress is fast, easy but to properly do your On-Site SEO you need to use plugin that will help with all on-site SEO work. I strongly recommend Yoast SEO as it is free and easy to configure, but I’ll walk you through how to properly configure Yoast SEO – basic configuration.

Installation

Installing Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is easy and has the same procedure as any other plugins available. Here are few steps if you do not know how to properly install a plugin:

Open Plugins tab in your WordPress administration and select Add New
In the right corner you will find search bar and enter Yoast SEO
Select Yoast SEO and click Install now
Under the installed plugins, Activate Yoast SEO

Select Yoast SEO and Install it

Yoast SEO Basic Configuration

After successfully installing and activating Yoast SEO plugin we will start with the basic configuration you need to do, so your site will have good On-Site SEO without any additional work. Start by selecting the SEO tab in your WordPress administration sidebar and here are my setting recommendation by tabs.

General

Here you need to enter some basic information regarding your website, as Google shows your website’s name in search results you should input your real info and title that you want to use.

Under the Webmaster Tools tab you can verify your website with different search engines like Google, Yahoo….If you do not use Google Search Console I strongly recommend as it will help you understand how Google index, crawls and analyses your website. It is free tool by Google and can help you find problems which can hurt your rankings.

Titles & Metas

Titles and Meta tags are not ranking factors as they used to be in the past but can be very helpful if properly set up, you can dramatically raise CTR from search results and receive more visitors.

Here is the configuration that I use on most of my websites:

General tab
Under this tab you can select the title separator that you want to use. I recommend – , but if you prefer any other symbols select the one you would like.

Homepage tab
For title template I use the default value: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%% , but you can mix it up as you like.

Meta description template is the one I prefer to do for every website unique, write a good description like marketing ads as this will get you good CTR if written properly.

Post Types tab
Under this tab you can find different title and meta description templates for posts and pages. I have both pages and posts templates like this: %%title%% %%page%% as it turns out that this is the best practice. I have empty meta description templates as I strongly recommend that you write unique descriptions under every posts or pages so it will be relevant with the target url. Make it good as mentioned before this will get you higher click-through rate.

Taxonomies tab
Here I use the default settings, the only change is that I have checked noindex, follow and hide on Categories and Tags. It turns out that it is the best options and have seen that many of well-known SEO guys use it like this.

Archives tab
Check noindex and follow twice under the duplicate content prevention.

Other tab
Under this tab I use noindex on subpages. Everything else is unchecked.

Social

If you use Social accounts, input them, if you do not want to use them leave it blank. It is your choice and depends on the site you have. I do not always have social accounts for every website but it is recommended if you have enough time to set it up to use this feature.

XML Sitemaps

Enable this feature to auto submit your sitemap to search engines, here you can also set up if you want to by any reason exclude any posts or other items from sitemap.

Advanced

Breadcrumbs tab
If you do not know what you are doing, make it disabled.

Permalinks tab
Under this tab I have some of the settings checked. My recommendation is to check following:

Redirect attachments to parent
Remove stop words
Remove replytocom variables

This is the basic configuration that I use on every website, apart from that I strongly recommend that you input unique Meta descriptions for every post or page and enter other information like focus keyword on every posts that you publish.

Do you have any ideas or your own recommendations? Share it with us!