In this WordPress SEO guide we will talk about the Yoast SEO plugin. That how you can set up the Yoast SEO plugin for better results.
Yoast is one of the popular WordPress plugin used to add meta title and meta description to a WordPress website. The plugin also helps you to do a lot more other things like robots.txt, generate sitemap, on-page SEO analysis, etc.
Yoast is a premium SEO plugin, but its basic features free for the lifetime. Here we are just sharing about all of the basic settings which come with the free version.
Basic implements which are necessary For Yoast For Better Results
Yoast Search Appearance Setting
Set Up Homepage Meta Information
If you are using a static page for your website, then you can set meta-information directly from the page.
But if you are not using any static page then you have to add meta information in Yoast setting.
- Go to Yoast settings
- Now choose search appearance
- Go to general
- And set meta-information for your homepage
Knowledge Graph For Homepage
Appearing your site in the knowledge graph of Google is really a good sign. The knowledge graph was introduced by Google in 2012 to make their search result page more relevant and useful for the users.
- Go to Yoast settings
- Now choose search appearance
- Go to search appearance
- Go to the knowledge graph
- Choose whether you’re a company or a person and fill all of the required information
WordPress Post & Page Settings
Show post in search results: Yes
Date In Snippet Review: Show
Yoast SEO meta box: Show
Choose these settings for both posts and pages
Media Settings
Media & attachment URL: Yes
Please make sure you choose to redirect all of the attached media URL to attachments.
Texonomies
Here you can do settings for post category, tags, and formats.
Categories and tags pages will create a duplicate page problem in your WordPress website.
So I will recommend you to not let search engine crawl category, tags and format pages.
So please set no for categories, tags.
For “post format” choose disable
Archives Settings
Archives places for author and date, also have no use in search engine. There is no need to index these pages so select disable for date and author achieves.
By disabling Archives pages, you will minimize the risk of duplicate content issues for your website.
Breadcrumbs
This is not Breadcrumbs, you use to eat.
Actually, it is the secondary navigation of your website which Google used to show to in SERP.
There are numerous benefit of using breadcrumbs on your website.
Just go the breadcrumbs settings and enable it and leave the other setting as it is.
Bold the last page: Choose Bold
Taxonomy to show in breadcrumbs for content types: Choose None
Google Search Console Setup
You can also set up Google search console with the help of yoast
Go to Google search console sign up for your website and get the authentication code and paste to yoast.
- Go to Yoast
- Choose Search console
- Paste the authentication code of search console
- Click on authenticate
Yoast Social Settings
Here you can attach the social media profile url of the website to the Yoast.
Yoast will let the search engines find the associated official social media pages of your website.
You can add social profile URL for these accounts
- Myspace
- YouTube
- Google Plus (but it is no longer active now)
You can also do settings that how your post will look when you will share them to the Social Media.
Learn to know how you can generate sitemap in WordPress with Yoast SEO Plugin