WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the top Search engine optimization plugin for WordPress. Setting and configuration of the Yoast Seo plugin is the tricky part.
If you make any mistake while setting Yoast for WordPress website/blog. It may lead to damage your site for example, it may deindex your website or stop from crawling and indexing your blog or website or create other issues.
If you want a better result and index website or blog post and pages you must have to configure it properly. So let start how we can setup Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
A Complete Setup and Configuration For Yoast SEO WordPress plugin:
First, you have to uninstall the other SEO plugins if you are already installed like All in one SEO plugin or others. Now go to your blog dashboard install and activate SEO by Yoast plugin.
For installation go to plugin menu in the dashboard and click on add plugin. Enter Yoast SEO in the search bar and install and active the first one plugin from the search result.If you have already had Yoast plugin make sure you have the latest version otherwise update it to the latest version.
Yoast SEO comes up with many features. We will explain each and every feature they provide.
1) Dashboard:
In this section, you will find all the Problem which occur in setting, Notification, Configuration Wizard, Restore to Default setting, all Feature of yoast, Website Name and company information, webmaster tool and security.
Website info: In the Dashboard section click on your info tab and Enter Website Name, Alternate Name and select Company or Person option.
Webmaster Tool: Add your website to Google webmaster, Yandex, and Bing Webmaster tool. Here is the details post on Add website to Google webmaster tool.
2) Titles & Metas – Yoast SEO:
In the section Title and Meta, we will go through Post type, taxonomies, Archives and other Meta Robot Setup.
General: In general Tab here we can set the Website title, and Enable Force rewrites title option. Select any Title separator and don’t check the force rewrite option.
Post Type Settings: Through this you can change the title template for your post and pages, media. Use the Setting in the below images. Index meta robots of Post, Pages, media.
Taxonomies: Don’t Index Meta robots for Category, tags, formats because it makes a duplicate content issue which leads to Google penalty.Some expert says make it index if you want to rank multiple keywords for the post, but I will not suggest you make it enable.
Archives and Others: Disable and no-index Meta robots for author archives, dates archives, subpages and Meta keyword tags, etc.
3) Link Social Profiles:
Enter the URL of all social profiles link related, so Search engines know which account are linked to the site.
4) XML Sitemap:
First of all enable XML sitemap function if the button is disable by default. The sitemap contains your website all links of post, pages, and media and informs Google search engines about website content.
Under the post type, exclude posts and taxonomies tab you can add or remove which thing you want to include in your sitemap.
Yoast SEO will automatically generate a sitemap for each post and pages you publish. Here is the guide to submitting your sitemap to Google webmaster tool.
5) Advanced :
Advance Breadcrumbs: Make the breadcrumb button enable this can give you an advantage in Google search result. Set the separator between pages and other option as shown in images below.
There is one more thing if you enable bread crumbs and your website don’t have breadcrumb coding you will need to change in your theme, so its will show on your website. Follow this guide to do it easily:
Implement Yoast Seo Breadcrumbs
Don’t do any change in permalink and RSS Tab.
6) Tools
This tab provides your editor for files and import and export Yoast plugins setting to another website. Sometime this option is very helpful if you don’t have Cpanel details of your website and want to edit your htaccess file and add some code or remove code. You can edit htaccess by clicking file editor link.
You can import setting from other SEO plugins or simply export this setting to use in other website/blog by click export and import link.
7) Yoast SEO POST Optimization:
Now after setting Yoast plugin properly, you will find a box below each post and pages which will help to add SEO title and SEO description for post and pages.You can edit snippet and add SEO title, description, Focus keyword and slug or URL for post optimization.
Conclusion: There are many other plugins for WordPress seo in competition with SEO by Yoast but Yoast always provides new features time to time. Make sure you have setup correctly SEO by yoast for WordPress plugin on your website.