Is Yoast Seo good? My answer to this is a YES, Yoast SEO Plugin is so far the best SEO plugin for WordPress. When it comes to optimizing your WordPress blog for SEO, over 90% of suggestions you will come across will encourage you to install the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast plugin. I use Yoast SEO plugin on all my websites and i can only say good about the plugin except for a few limitations.
Before we look at how to use Yoast SEO plugin for the best results, you should know that the plugin has both free and paid plans. The free plan will work just fine for your blog but will limit you to less features. One of my dislikes about Yoast SEO plugin is the limitation of adding only one focus keyword on it’s free plan. All in One SEO will let you add multiple focus keywords on a post for free which isn’t the case with Yoast SEO plugin.
Best Configurations for Yoast SEO
Searching for how to install Yoast SEO plugin correctly on your site? This article mainly highlights the best configurations for Yoast SEO plugin, hence, i won’t talk much about it’s pros and cons or draw up comparisons to keep it brief. Below are some of the best Yoast SEO settings that will give you good results. I use the same configurations on most of my blogs and i believe they will work for you too. I came up with this Yoast SEO guide to show you how to use Yoast SEO WordPress plugin for the best results on your blog. Simply adjust your settings to match the one i recommend on this article.
General Settings
We are going to edit only 1 tab under the General Settings page which is the Webmaster Tools page. All you have to do is open up respective accounts for the Webmaster Tools you need to verify. You can do this exclusively as well but usually when you change a theme you have to place the meta values again on the new theme. Adding it from Yoast SEO plugin can save you this. In the screenshot below, Bing, Google Console and Yandex are all blank because i added meta tags on my WordPress theme for verification.
Titles and Metas
User the Titles and Metas page you should see 6 other tabs (General, Homepage, Post Types, Taxonomies, Archives and Other).
Under the General tab, you can change the separator that will separate your post title from the blog title if you wish to. I recommend leaving this to it’s default unless you need to change it.
Under the Homepage tab, leave the title template the way it is if you don’t have broad knowledge about the plugin’s title tags. The default title template usually works just fine. You need to change the Meta Description Template. This template will be used as the excerpt for your homepage on search engines.
Under the Post Types tab, index Meta Robots, hide date in snippet preview and show Yoast SEO Meta Box for posts, pages and media respectively.
Under the Taxonomies tab i recommend you noindex and hide Yoast SEO Meta Box on both categories and tabs. All this will help you have only relevant links on search engine. Very many people nowadays add so many tags to a post and index them not knowing they are flooding search engines with irrelevant content which in turn affects their SEO. Never make a mistake of indexing tags on your WordPress Blog.
Under Archives tab, disable and noindex both Author archives and Date-based archives. These two Yoast SEO plugin options create duplicate content especially in cases where you run a one-author blog.
Lastly, under the Other tab, noindex Subpages of archives then disable meta keywords tag and noodp. See screenshot below:
Social
The social settings page of Yoast SEO is also very vital. One advantage of adding all your profiles here is to show relation of your blog to your respective social profiles.usually when a visitor searches for your website on search engine, all the social media pages associated with your account will appear in the search results. Interesting right? You surely don’t want to miss out on this.
Enter your respective social media profiles, enable open graph meta data in case your theme lacks it, enable twitter card meta data then verify your Pinterest and Google+ accounts.
XML Sitemaps
If you know what a sitemap is then this is more like self-explanatory to you. You have to enable sitemap functionality. In fact there is no use of making all the configurations above on your Yoast SEO plugin yet you have the sitemap functionality disabled. Every blog needs a sitemap to appear in search results and so does your blog but remember we are trying to keep only relevant pages on search engines implicating we have to make some exclusions in our sitemap. Your configurations should look similar to the screenshot below.
General Tab
Author / User Sitemap Tab
Post Types Tab
Taxonomies Tab
Advanced
The last part of Yoast SEO configuration we are going to look at is the advanced settings page. For this page we are going to mainly deal with the Permalinks Tab. Since most themes nowadays come with inbuilt breadcrumbs functionality, i recommend leaving the breadcrumbs option disables. RSS is not so important and we can ignore it. Your Permalinks Tab should look similar to the screenshot below.
That sums up our configuration for Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress. The WordPress SEO by Yoast tutorial above will not only give your the best results, but also get your blog only relevant pages and links on search engine which is a good ranking factor. Have any questions about Yoast SEO configuration? feel free to drop me a comment below.
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