Yoast SEO — that’s the subject of this lesson. What is Yoast SEO and how do you get the most out of it? Is the free version enough, or is the Premium version worth it? Are you better off with Yoast SEO or with native tools such as Genesis? What are the credible alternatives? There’s plenty to get through.
In this Yoast SEO guide, for beginners and everyone else, we’ll walk through the steps to follow — starting with installing the plugin — to optimize your page or website.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to ranking on search engines. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you don’t yet know the Yoast SEO tool, are struggling with its many features, or want to understand how to use it effectively.
So let’s stop wasting time and answer all your questions. Here we go!
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What is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular free plugins for WordPress and other CMSs for optimizing your pages and articles for search and ranking them better in the SERP on Google and the other search engines.
Automatic SEO optimization
The tool lets you optimize the meta tags inside the HTML (title, meta description, keywords, robots), permalinks (more here) and other elements that search engines read before serving results to users.
With Yoast SEO you can also submit a sitemap to Google and the other search engines, optimize breadcrumbs and RSS feeds, and connect your page to social media easily.
The crucial thing is that no particular technical skill is required of the user, and this SEO tool will warn you when your site hasn’t been optimized properly.
Page analysis and writing support
One of the features that made this SEO plugin the most widely used, particularly among WordPress devotees, is the support it gives while you’re writing a page or article. Through page analysis the tool offers the SEO copywriter or blogger real help in the form of useful suggestions.
It will help you see whether you’re using a keyword correctly, count the words for you along with their density in the text, and suggest ways to improve your headings and subheadings. The plugin also flags a tendency towards long, complex sentences — it even underlines them. All of it useful for ranking your content on search engines.
Image from yoast.com
Having covered what Yoast SEO is and some of what it does, let’s look closely at three basic jobs:
- running the configuration wizard properly, along with the other settings
- knowing and using the meta box
- an advanced grasp of the Yoast SEO dashboard
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Yoast SEO: configuration and the basics
Let’s walk through the steps for setting Yoast SEO up properly.
The configuration wizard and other settings
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can reach the dashboard from the admin panel via: Yoast SEO > General > Dashboard.
Like other tools, Yoast SEO offers anyone new to the plugin a guided setup path (the configuration wizard), made available and visible straight away.
Image from yoast.com
At the end, one click on the same panel lets you check that the procedure ran correctly.
The configuration wizard is an easy guided path that gets the plugin configured properly in a few simple steps. Along the way you’ll see various sections and be asked questions covering both functionality and SEO. The procedure naturally produces a standard configuration.
After clicking “configuration wizard”, the next click is on “configure Yoast SEO”. On the page that appears, the first of the 10 sections to configure is “Environment”.
Environment section
As the screenshot shows, the first choice is whether your site is already built and indexed by the search engine or still under construction.
Image from yoast.com
Site type
Here you tell the Yoast SEO plugin what kind of site this is, choosing the right option from the list.
Image from yoast.com
Organization or person
The next step is to say whether your site belongs to an individual or to an organisation. In the first case you enter the person’s name; in the second you’ll need to provide:
- the organisation’s name
- the organisation’s logo, preferably 112×112 pixels
Image from yoast.com
The information in this section lets Yoast SEO give Google extra detail, which the search engine may then show in the SERP as a Knowledge Graph card.
Search engine visibility
In this important section you specify whether and which content you want the search engine to index.
Image from yoast.com
Multiple authors
Here you state whether there’s a single author or several people can write and publish pages and articles on the site. The choice isn’t trivial: the plugin itself tells you that in the first case the author’s content archives won’t be indexed. A “noindex” instruction in the page’s HTML keeps them out of the index and so avoids Google penalties for duplicate content.
If you expect other authors to write on your blog, choose “Yes” so that each author’s archive appears in the search results of the various engines.
Image from yoast.com
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a Google tool that gives you valuable information about how your site is performing, and it’s very likely already in your SEO toolbox. A single click on “get Google authorization code” gets you a code that lets you import the information you need. GSC isn’t required for the Yoast SEO plugin to work, so you can click “Next” and skip this step if you prefer.
Title settings
This section lets you set or change the “title” of your website as it appears on search engines, and choose which “separator” to use from the ones offered.
Image from yoast.com
If your blog post is titled, say, “how to use Yoast SEO” and the settings match the screenshot, it will look something like this on Google: “How to use Yoast SEO – Euwebagency Demo site”
Finishing the setup
In the last two sections Yoast SEO will invite you to sign up to its newsletter and to buy the Premium version of the plugin. If neither appeals, click “close” to end the setup process.
Image from yoast.com
Using the Yoast SEO meta box
The meta box is one of the main places you interact with the Yoast SEO plugin. It lets you:
- analyse the readability of the text
- preview the snippet
- run an SEO analysis
To carry out one or more of these content optimization jobs, or to move between them, just click the corresponding icons shown in the image.
Image from yoast.com
To see the meta box and edit its settings, though, you first need to create or edit an article or page. On the edit screen you’ll see the meta box headed “Yoast SEO”. If it isn’t showing, log in as administrator, click “screen options” at the top right and check that “Yoast SEO” is ticked.
Image from yoast.com
Careful: changes made in the meta box are saved automatically but only temporarily. Leave the input field or switch to a different tab and they’re lost. To keep them, click the “update” button.
The SEO tab
Let’s get into the plugin and see everything it can do.
Snippet preview
The first area on the content optimization tab is the snippet preview. Click “edit snippet” and you can change the SEO title and the meta description by hand while seeing the effect as you go. Changes are saved by clicking “close snippet editor”.
Image from Yoast.com
SEO analysis & text readability
Another important area is the SEO analysis of the text, which also covers readability. The readability score emulates how human visitors read the content and returns feedback with advice on improving it. On the SEO side you get useful information on a range of elements:
- internal and outbound links
- length of the key phrase
- density of the key phrase
- presence of the key phrase in the title and the meta description
- length of the title and the meta description
- image alt attribute
- text length
- and more besides
Image from yoast.com
The Yoast SEO social media tab
This tab lets you set how your content and its elements (title, description and images) will be displayed on social media. To change how your page looks on a particular network, first click the tab bearing that network’s icon.
Image from yoast.com
The advanced tab
This tab of the meta box lets you set particular aspects of the site, such as the one mentioned earlier that tells search engines not to index a specific piece of content.
Image from yoast.com
An advanced grasp of the Yoast SEO dashboard
The dashboard is the main page, the control panel from which the main jobs are done. It’s also where the site’s owner (under the “General” tab) is warned about problems that have been found, and given guidance on where and how to fix them.
Image from yoast.com
Another tab is “Features”, where you can enable or disable the plugin’s many capabilities. The main ones are:
- SEO analysis
- Readability analysis
- Cornerstone content
- XML sitemaps
- Link counter
- Security settings for authors
On the webmaster tools tab, Yoast SEO lets you analyse the site with the webmaster tools of the various search engines (Baidu, Bing, Google and Yandex).
Alternatives to Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is without doubt one of the best SEO plugins on the market, thanks to how easy it is to use and the range of features and settings it offers.
An interesting alternative is “The SEO Framework”, notable for being light and fast. This plugin focuses on a subject rather than a keyword, and performs better than other SEO plugins.
A second option is “All in One SEO Pack”. Alongside all the basic features, it offers some interesting extras. There’s a fuller comparison of these three tools in this piece.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered Yoast SEO. You now have what you need to configure and use this SEO tool yourself, and to use it well — but that alone isn’t enough.
SEO is a process in constant development, and it never guarantees you’ll rank a piece of content at the top of Google. Tools only work when they’re used well, and that takes skill and experience.
Which is why staying up to date matters. Keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
Need help configuring and using the Yoast SEO plugin? Get in touch! We’ll help you set Yoast up properly.
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