Setting up Yoast SEO for your WordPress website is an essential step in ensuring that your site is optimized for search engine optimization. This article will provide you with a comprehensive guide to installing and configuring Yoast SEO for the best possible results.
Getting Started
Before you begin, make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed. Yoast SEO requires WordPress 4.1 or higher to be installed.
Next, download the Yoast SEO plugin from the WordPress repository. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will see a new Yoast SEO tab in the left navigation menu of your WordPress site.
Configuring Yoast SEO
The first thing you will want to do is set up the General Settings for Yoast SEO. The General Settings tab allows you to set up the basic settings for the plugin.
The first section is where you will enter your site's title, description, and keywords. You should also enter the company name and website address, as these are needed for verification purposes.
The next section is where you will enter the Contact Person and Company name, as well as the default settings for post and page titles and meta descriptions. You can also choose to enable advanced setting options to further customize your Yoast SEO settings.
The next section is where you can select a Default Meta Robots value. This setting allows you to choose how search engine crawlers should treat your site, such as with Noindex, Nofollow, or Index and Follow.
The last section is where you will set the Permalinks settings for your site. You can select the Post type and category bases here, as well as decide whether or not to use clean URLs.
Analyzing Your Content
Once the setup is complete, you will want to start using the content analysis features of Yoast SEO. You can do this from the SEO -> Content Analysis tab.
The Content Analysis tab will allow you to check the SEO-readiness of any page or post from within the WordPress editor. You can also run a bulk analysis if you have multiple pages or posts to check.
The analysis will check for keyword usage, readability, meta descriptions, title tags, and more. For each item, you will be given an indication of how well it meets the recommended guidelines and whether or not it needs to be improved.
Using the Yoast SEO Dashboard
The Yoast SEO Dashboard is where you will find all the data and information about what is going on with your SEO. Here, you will find a breakdown of the number of impressions, clicks, and keyword rankings, as well as the average position for each keyword.
You can also get an overview of all of your content, including both published and unpublished pages. This will allow you to get an idea of which pages and posts are performing the best and which ones need more work.
Setting Up the XML Sitemap
The XML Sitemap feature of Yoast SEO allows you to trigger the creation of an XML sitemap for your site. This will allow search engine crawlers to easily find and index your pages.
To set up an XML Sitemap, simply go to the XML Sitemap tab in the Yoast SEO dashboard. Here, you can select which types of content you want to include in your sitemap. You can also set up a robots.txt file to control access to certain pages of your site.
Using the Advanced Settings
The Advanced Settings tab in Yoast SEO allows you to further customize what content gets indexed and how search engines should treat it. Here, you can set up custom titles and meta descriptions for different post types. You can also specify which content should be included in the XML sitemap and whether or not it should be indexed.
Using the Social Media Settings
The Social Media Settings tab in Yoast SEO allows you to customize how your content is shared on social media. You can specify which image should be used when your content is shared and what title and description should be used.
You can also specify how each platform should handle links to your content, such as whether it should be opened in a new tab or the same tab.
Conclusion
Installing and configuring Yoast SEO correctly will greatly improve your website's SEO performance. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can ensure that your WordPress website is properly optimized for search engine visibility.