The Importance of YOAST SEO in WordPress
WordPress is a platform where you can easily and nicely design well looking professional website. It is also famous for its features and functions. Yoast SEO makes any site more perfect for search engine ranking.
Yoast SEO comes with tons of features to optimize your website. It has built-in content analysis, Meta keywords, and description management, managing duplicate content, XML sitemaps, social features, rich snippets, and much more.

Yoast’s General Settings tab serves as a starter page where you can check out their resource listings, set up some personal information, and integrate different webmaster tools such as Google Search Console.
To access the fields where you can customize your on-page SEO, you have to navigate to the Titles & Metas tab where you’ll find tons of customization options for the homepage, post types, taxonomies, and archives. Each section is nicely organized in tabs with title templates, Meta description templates, and several other options for each major page type.
Yoast also includes customizable options that appear beneath every page and post editor which forcefully remind you to choose a keyword and encourage its use in the heading, page title, URL, content, and meta description of your posts or pages. You can also switch through the tabs to get a page analysis, customize some advanced robots.txt settings, and specify what information you want social networks to use.
If you are still wondering about SEO plugin which one should be installed for better search engine ranking? I can say that Yoast SEO is one of the popular and most powerful WordPress plugins ever. I have also used All in One as an SEO plugin for WordPress site but I have found Yoast SEO more fruitful. The reason behind saying that I will take you through the features and performance of this plugin. I am personally using this plugin for my own blogging site and it really helps a lot in optimizing my content for better SEO and readability.
You might have tried to work on the SEO of your website. You must have found some issues or errors on your site but you have no time to take a deep dive into the matter to fix them up. And even your website developers are busy with their own work. But how can you easily do the SEO yourself for your site?
If you get in touch with any SEO expert, they will fix all issues and improve the ranking of your website. They can give you the better services depending on your subscriptions. It might cost you a lot monthly, quarterly or yearly. To some extent, you can optimize your website yourself with the help of Yoast SEO.
Let’s grab some ideas how you can optimize your website yourself by installing Yoast SEO plugin:
Configuring the Yoast Settings: –If you already have this plugin then it’s wonderful, if not, go to plugins tab in your WordPress dashboard–Add New — Search Yoast SEO — install/activate.
- Go to Yoast Seo Dashboard, there is nothing to change but you can see the number of problems and notification details.
- Next jump over the General tab, there you will find configuration wizard. You need to open the configuration wizard and do the settings step by step.
- Features — Yoast SEO comes with a lot of features. You can enable or disable the settings according to your needs.
- Company Info –In this option, you can fill out your website information, Company or person information and upload the company Logo which should be at least 200*200PX
- Webmaster tools let you enter the different webmaster tools using the HTML verification code. Such as Bing webmaster tools, Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster tools.
Steps for verifying webmaster tools:-
- Login to Google Search Console (Bing and Yandex have the same process)
- Select the “HTML tag” verification process
- Copy the code and Paste into the Google Search Console field
- Save changes in Yoast and then Click verify
- Security –Next comes the Security settings. You can either enable it or disable it. If you do not trust your editors with things like noindex (means you are choosing not to index a post in the search engine), disable this.
There are many other advanced tools in Yoast SEO which you set up one by one for better ranking in the search engine.
Titles and Metas — One thing you need to focus to avoid happening the duplicate site name in SEO title. If you use the same title what your blog post has then it will be considered as a duplicate title. So, make sure you will rewrite the different title for SEO purpose.
Social–Fill out the social setting by putting all your social profile information by enabling each social network’s Metadata. This setting help search engine to learn about your social profiles.
Facebook Image: — 1200*628PX
Twitter Image: — 1024*512 PX
Upload custom images to make content format properly on Facebook and Twitter.
XML Sitemaps–Yoast SEO creates a sitemap for your website automatically so you no need to use any separate XML Sitemap plugin.
Submitting Your Yoast Sitemap to Google
- Go to SEO → XML Sitemaps
- Click the XML Sitemap button (see photo above)
- Copy the last past of the URL: /sitemap_index.xml
- Login to Google Search Console
- On the left, go to Crawl → Sitemap
- Paste the last part of the URL (screenshot below)
- Test and submit
- Repeat for Bing and Yandex
Breadcrumbs–Breadcrumbs are the navigational text that appears on the top of your content which help search engines to learn your site structure but few people don’t like to prevent the clutter. If you want the extra text in your content you can enable the breadcrumbs, add this code to Editor → Index.php by pasting it under getting header ();
Get header (); ?>
<div id=”primary”>
<?php if ( function_exists(‘yoast_breadcrumb’) ) {
yoast_breadcrumb(‘<p id=”breadcrumbs”>’,’</p>’);
} ?>
<div id=”content” role=”main”>
Permalinks–Remove the category and stop words like a, the, and, why and other non-descriptive words from URL. It should be SEO friendly. Redirects attachment to the actual post. If people happen to find an image URL, PDF URL, or any file you upload to WordPress, enabling this will redirect visitors who find that file URL to the parent post URL (they will be redirected to the actual page it was uploaded to).
Research Focus Keyword: –Do not put any keyword with your own sense just because that is common. Do the proper research for your focus keyword. Find the long tail specific keyword in keyword explorer. Target keywords where search results contain weak/irrelevant content. Avoid keywords where strong content/websites are in the top results. Google each keyword using MozBar to learn which one is best. Must check the search volume for each keyword.
Now you are ready to create a webpage, set your focus keyword, write some content and optimize your site by using Yoast SEO. I hope you have learned how to install Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO is one of those plugins that you can use for free without ever needing to buy the premium version of the plugin. In fact, it is currently installed on millions of website all over the world.
The only downside is that the free plugin does not come with support. Mainly because it would be impossible to answer support queries from hundreds and thousands of users from all over for free.
There are extensive documentation and tutorials available for Yoast SEO plugin. The plugin provides on-screen instructions for each feature inside the admin area. Features and SEO concepts are also explained on the author’s website. Yoast SEO is one of the most used WordPress plugins, so you will easily find tutorials and guides created by other users all over the web.
This does not mean that support is not available. You can purchase a single site license for as low as $69 per year. The premium version of the plugin also gives you access to additional features and premium support from the folks behind Yoast SEO.
Techfee also has a team to review and improve your website. If you want to hire SEO expert for any small or large company, then you can drop your request here in the contact form.
Let our SEO experts regularly do a website review.
- Get an extensive check on technical issues, security, content and more.
- Our team will take care of the implementation of the improvements for you.
- Includes a Yoast SEO Premium license!
What do we review?
We’ll do an in-depth analysis of your website, checking more than 200 important SEO and Usability characteristics. We’ll manually check and evaluate:
- Crawlability
- Findability
- Site speed
- Site structure
- Content
- HTML and XML sitemaps
- Your use of structured data (f.i. schema.org)
- And many, many more aspects of your site
It takes a lot of configuring the Yoast SEO plugin settings, focuses keywords, and optimizing content. If you have any confusion or any questions OR, you need SEO consultant, Contact Us.
Originally published at techfee.com on July 26, 2017.