Wordpress SEO With Yoast SEO Plugin
How to Optimize Your Wordpress Blog for Search Engines with Yoast SEO Plugin
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Yoast SEO is among the most popular wordpress seo plugins with more than 5 million active installations and a 4.8 rating from 27,590 votes. SEO is among the most critical parts of blogging and to start with you need a fantastic SEO plugin to rank your content and make your website visible.
Yoast comes loaded with features which apart from optimizing your content for rankings also help you with creating high quality content that can rank easily. The free version has most of the useful features but the pro version includes some features that can make Wordpress SEO easier for you. While it is generally very straightforward to set the plugin, new users may find some features confusing or difficult to optimize. In this guide, we will explain how to use Yoast SEO for best results.
You can install SEO from the wordpress plugin repository just as you add any of the plugins. Just go to your wordpress admin dashboard and then to plugins. Click on add new and search for Yoast in the plugin repository. Click on install and then activate. Following the activation of the plugin, you can run the first time configuration to optimize SEO data and then set the plugin features according to your need. ‘
With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can edit your post metadata, easily add no index and nofollow to categories and tag archives as well as edit your robots.txt file and .htaccess files. However, Yoast also includes additional features that we will discuss in this post.
Yoast SEO Plugin Basic Features
Starting with the Yoast features, you only need to select the features you will need on your website. Go to the Wordpress dashboard and you will find Yoast settings in the left sidebar. Click on settings under Yoast. Now, you can select the features to activate from the list of SEO features on Yoast dashboard.
Here are the features that are basically required by a wordpress blog and should be activated:
SEO analysis (analyzes on page seo and makes suggestions)
Readability analysis (suggestions related to the readability of your content including the readability score)
Text link counter (information about number of internal links in your content and suggestions. There is a pro feature Link Suggestions which suggests where you should add an internal link in your content.)
Social sharing (Yoast SEO feature for Open Graph and Twitter Card data)
Admin bar Menu (the admin bar menu for yoast can be activated to access Yoast features from the top)
XML Sitemaps (Yoast will create a sitemap that you can submit to google search console)
These are the main features that you might need to activate when using Yoast for the first time. Additionally, if you want, you can also activate cornerstone content (most important articles which undergo extra testing by Yoast) and the insights feature which will offer insights into the topic and structure of your content. You can leave the REST API endpoint feature disabled unless you are planning to use headless wordpress.
In the same settings section, you will find site basics right below site features. In this section, you must enter the site name and tagline and leave the rest as default settings. You can also add a default site image for posts with no featured images set.
Now, move on to the next section, which is site representation. You can select whether your website represents an organization or person. You can continue with the default settings which is organization and under organization name just fill the website name. Add your organization logo and links to your social profiles on this page. Subsequently, move on to the site connections settings. Here you can add your google search console verification code and codes for Bing or Pinterest and Baidu.
Home Pages, Posts and Static Pages:
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The content types section includes the SEO settings for home pages, posts and static pages on your blog. Here you can select how your homepage, posts and pages appear in the search results. For the home page, search appearance, keep the site title variable only and remove the rest. Optionally, you can keep the site title and tagline, if your tagline is short. For meta description, write a nice description of what your website includes. You can use this description for your social description too. Add an image that can be used on social media channels for your homepage. It does not need to be your logo but something nice that includes your brand name.
You must have seen the name of a blog at the end of the heading in search results. It can be useful for marketing. However, in several cases people like to show only the SEO title of a post in the search results, without adding the site name at the end. It depends on how you want your search results to look like. Posts are set to be indexed by default. For SEO title, keep the variables, title, separator and Site title.
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Remove any other variable from the box. This will ensure that the post title or SEO title is used in search results followed by Site name. If you do not want the site name to show in search results, remove the separator and site title variables. You can leave the meta description box for posts empty since you can create meta descriptions for individual posts.
However if you want Yoast SEO to automatically include a description, you can use the Excerpt variable in this box. The better method is to write meta descriptions for individual posts and not leave the job to the plugin. You can use the same settings for static pages as well. However, if you do not want your static pages indexed, just toggle the switch next to show pages in search results off.
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No-Index Categories and Tags
Now comes a very important part. For new users, especially, it is difficult to answer whether they must get the categories and tags indexed or not. There is no need to get your categories and tag urls indexed, particularly in the case of a wordpress blog. The default setting for categories in Yoast SEO is index but you can toggle switch off to no index your categories archives. Getting your tags and categories archive urls indexed can cause index bloat and lead to decline in SERP rankings.
Toggle the switch next to show categories in search results off and leave the rest settings as they were. Click on save changes and move on to the settings for tags. Disable the search appearance of tags just like you did for the categories and save changes. You want to disable the search appearance of categories and tags and these urls do not need to be included in the sitemaps either.
At the bottom of the settings, you will find the advanced settings. Here you will need to proceed with slight caution, especially if you are a new user.
Crawl Optimization with Yoast SEO
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The crawl optimization part of the advanced settings in Yoast SEO is a slightly newer feature and aims to help bloggers optimize crawling of their website/blog. This part includes the features that can help you remove unwanted metadata or the metadata that is not useful in terms of SEO or wordpress functionality. You can safely remove all of the unwanted metadata since that will also have a positive impact on wordpress speed.
You can safely select to remove short links, Rest API links (if not using headless wordpress), RSD/WLW links, oEmbed links and other unwanted metadata. You can safely disable the xmlrpc, generator tag and powered by HTTP header also. So, overall you can toggle on all the switches in ‘remove unwanted metadata settings’ without any risk.
The next part in the same section is to remove unwanted content formats. In wordpress, you do not want any of your archive urls getting indexed by google since it will only cause index bloat, eat up the crawl budget and affect rankings negatively. The unwanted content formats are the urls that you don’t want your crawl budget being wasted upon. For example, you don’t want googlebot wasting the precious crawl budget crawling feed urls or author archives and format archives.
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If you like you can totally disable feed links using the Yoast SEO plugin. This feature can be particularly useful if Google is regularly crawling your feed urls or if feed urls are appearing among indexed urls. You need to look into the search console data regularly to find out if any unwanted url crops up among the indexed posts.
Whether you disable the global feed or not is totally up to you. It will disable the urls like example.com/feed. The feed urls are not used a lot now so if you like you can disable them safely. Users can directly read the posts on your website instead of through a feed reader. You do not want your search results feeds or comments feeds getting crawled either. So, you can overall disable the crawling of all types of feeds listed in Yoast SEO plugin settings for unwanted content format. Subsequently you can also remove unused resources which will affect site performance and speed like the emoji scripts and the WP-JSON API.
Yoast SEO also includes a feature to block google adbot. You can continue with default settings unless you are planning to not use any form of advertising on your blog.
Internal Search
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Internal search spam is a common problem that wordpress blogs deal with. However, Yoast has included features to deal with internal search spam. Spammers can insert spam urls which may get indexed by manipulating internal search results. To prevent internal search spam, just toggle the filter search terms button on and then the buttons next to filtering searches with emojis and common spam patterns, and redirect pretty urls to raw formats. Finally, switch on the feature to prevent the crawling of internal search urls since you do not want internal search urls getting crawled and indexed and hurting the search rankings of your post urls.
Noindex url parameters
In the same section for crawl optimization, you will find the advanced feature to deal with url parameters or query strings. These are the urls with query strings like ?color=red. You do not want these urls being crawled or indexed either. While you may generally need this feature if your search console is having too many unwanted urls with query strings. However, you can also use it as a precaution to keep urls with query strings out of google indexation. It is generally safe to use these features for a simple wordpress blog unless you need those query strings in the urls. Some plugins can also generate urls with query strings that do not need to be crawled or indexed. Google analytics links also contain a tracking parameter or query string. You can remove unwanted url parameters or optimize google analytics utm tracking parameters using Yoast. Just switch on both the features and it won’t hurt your SEO. Hit save changes.
Noindex author and date archives
The breadcrumbs settings in Yoast are quite straightforward and simple and you can alter their settings as you desire. Move on to the author archives. You can enable or disable the author archives in Yoast SEO settings. However, you don’t want these urls getting indexed so you can disable them entirely or no-index them. To noindex the author archives, toggle the switch next to show author archives in search results to off. There is no reason to index these urls since it will only waste your crawl budget and adversely impact rankings. Keep the date archives and format archives disabled. The reason is the same as for the other archives. Now, let’s come to the media pages. Wordpress creates separate urls for media pages which you do not want getting indexed otherwise your rankings will fall. You will need to keep the settings for media pages disabled so that the media pages are redirected to the media itself. This will keep the wordpress media pages out of google indexation. Special pages like search pages and 404 pages are no index by default in Yoast SEO and you must keep the default settings for these pages. Leave the boxes in the RSS feed section blank since you have disabled them already.
How to use Yoast SEO for Managing on-page SEO
You can use Yoast SEO for adding meta SEO title and descriptions to individual posts, setting canonical links and for optimizing your content for better results. The settings for individual posts are found under the posts where you can edit the SEO title, post slug and meta description.
Another feature of Yoast that can be useful for you when writing content is the SEO analysis feature. While writing content, it is important to mind the quality, number of internal and external links, readability of the content and other things which will help engage users and increase the chances of ranking higher.
You will find the SEO analysis under the post below the meta descriptions. Yoast provides an analysis based on various factors that I have already outlined above as well as title and post length, which also affect SEO. While Yoast will automatically set the canonical url for individual posts, you can change it in the advanced section under individual posts. Yoast Premium allows you to add a focus keyphrase for which you want to rank your post in searches and will accordingly offer suggestions and insights.
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If you have kept the readability analysis feature of Yoast SEO on, you will also get the analysis results in the right sidebar. Aim for a good score. Posts with higher readability have higher chances of ranking on the first page.
However, a key thing I would like to highlight before I conclude is that you use only the features you need and leave the ones you don’t consider necessary.
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