How to Configure SEO By Yoast Plugin 2016. This article is a continuation of my old articles about Increase Traffic with the Right Yoast Settings. SEO by Yoast has experienced many advances and updates very frequently so that an awful lot of changes in terms of features or appearance. SEO plugin by Yoast is one of the several free plugins that are very popular and phenomenal. SEO By Yoast plugin has been integrated with many important features such as Meta Robots Plugin, RSS Footer Plugin, social media, sitemap, and much more. This plugin, adapts to the conditions of the most recent SEO technique, so to make arrangements Yoast plugin is not easy, especially for new bloggers. I want to share a tutorial that will help you to configure SEO by Yoast plugin properly and produce optimal site performance and improve SEO in order to compete in the google search engine.
Table of Contents
SEO BY YOAST PLUGIN
SEO by Yoast is a very powerful plugin to make it easy for WordPress users who want to optimize a WordPress site in order to be SEO friendly. However, the settings of this plugin can be difficult for some people who don’t have the basic skills of SEO. You should know that doing the wrong configuration can stop the search engine bots from indexing your blog. Before you read the configuration section, you should find out in advance some SEO features offered by this plugin:
- Verify your site in Google, Bing, and Yandex
- Settings meta title
- Hide RSD, WLW, shortlinks from header
- Meta-Control for the taxonomy and the author’s page
- Supports Facebook Open Graph
- XML Sitemap
- Advanced permalink control
- Breadcrumbs Support
- Setting the footer Plugin RSS feed
- Import settings from other SEO plugins.
- Edit the .htaccess file and robots.txt
- Hide date in search results of Search engines
- Add Google author for a single author
HOW TO CONFIGURE SEO BY YOAST PLUGIN BY SEEGATESITE.
Now lets start the tutorial complete guide to configuring SEO by Yoast plugin.
Install the Yoast plugin first :
SEO by Yoast plugin has several menus as shown below
We will not discuss it entirely, I will discuss the important menu only.
DASHBOARD MENU
The first step to start this plugin is submitting your site to Google, Bing, and Yandex webmaster tools. After installing the plugin and get the verification code, SEO » General » Webmaster Tools.
No doubt you already know a function from google and bing webmaster tools, so I don’t have to discuss in more detail.
TITLE AND METAS MENU
Title and metas are the part that is quite important. See the following picture
Homepage
Click on the Homepage tab and configure the settings for your title site and meta description.
Title Template : The title of the homepage that you want to show in a Google search.
Meta Description : Site meta description on the homepage to be displayed in the search engines.
Post Types
This section will configure SEO for all types of your post. By default, you will have Post Pages & media type. If you use custom types more in WordPress, you will see a section here. Here you can define SEO for posts, pages and media section of your WordPress blog. By default the WordPress SEO by Yoast hide dates from search engines, this is useful for blogs that do not always publish articles every day. If you run a blog of news and want to display the date of your post on the search engine, you can choose “show” on the option “Date in snippet preview“.
Taxonomies
In the taxonomies tab, I chose the noindex and dofollow. However, this depends on the type of your blog. If you want to use the settings I use, simply select “noindex” and “hide”. But it should be remembered that this arrangement may depend with your needs. Since I don’t index your tags and categories,
Archives
I chose to noindex and nofollow on archives, because if your site is only used by 1 person author will usually cause a duplicate content problem.
Other
I suggest you choose the noindex on “Subpages of archives” and disabled on “use meta keyword tags” (because meta keyword is no longer used in the calculation of the SERP) and choose disabled on “Force noodp meta robots tag sitewide“
SOCIAL MENU
SEO by Yoast plugin has added new features to Google Knowledge Graph. This will display your social media profile in the search engine every time someone searches for Your brand name. configuration is very easy, you just need to add all your social media profile in the column provided.
XML SITEMAPS MENU
Enable this XML sitemaps feature will take care of the sitemap of your blog. After you have created the Sitemap file, submit the Sitemap URL to Google, Bing and other search engines & receive file Sitemaps. You do not need to install another sitemap plugin, simply done by Yoast in order not to duplicate sitemap
ADVANCED MENU
breadcrumbS
Yoast breadcrumbs plugin has been providing if the WordPress theme that you are using does not have the breadcrumbs features. To use this feature is quite easy, you just need to add the following code
1 2 3 4 5 | <span class="hljs-keyword"><?php if</span> ( function_exists(<span class="hljs-string">'yoast_breadcrumb'</span>) ) { yoast_breadcrumb(<span class="hljs-string">''</span>,<span class="hljs-string">''</span>); } |
put the above code in single.php and page.php page above the page title. Or you can put on the page header.php in the last line.
Permalink
Especially with this plugin, it’s easier to get rid of the parameters replytocom.
Tools
You can edit your .htaccess file and robots.txt from the dashboard. So with the existence of a file edit, you don’t need to get into the cpanel hosting.
Thus my article about the correct way to configure SEO by Yoast WordPress plugin , hope useful 🙂
