WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems now a days specially when it comes to great plug-in database especially its approach to manage SEO activities so well with a number of SEO plug-ins. SEO by Yoast is one of the best or you can say All in one plug-in which comprises almost all on page SEO features at one place. However still many people still got confusion about its installation and Setup guide. Keeping it in mind, I am dedicating this complete post as a tutorial to my readers.
SEO by Yoast – Installation and Activation
For installing SEO by Yoast follow these steps:
- Login to your WordPress dashboard.
- Under Sidebar Menu go to “Plugins -> Add New”
- Under Search option, search for “WordPress SEO by Yoast” and click on “Install Now”.
- After complete installation click on the “Activate Plugin”.
SEO By Yoast Interface
1. Dashboard
There are mainly two options to look for carefully under Dashboard option.
First is the “Disable the Advanced part of the WordPress SEO meta box”
Make sure to keep this checkbox checked. Well if unchecked by a non-knowledgeable user then this can cause your posts to be redirected, setting them to on-index etc causing a big harm to your site.
Second important stuff here is the Options for verifying Google Webmasters Tools, Bing Webmasters Tools and Alexa accounts for your website. You simple need to put the verification code in the corresponding boxes.
2. Titles & Metas
1. General
Under this you will find options to control your meta and title tag settings. Well you can enforce re-writing of titles of the posts by simply checking the “Force rewrite titles” check box under Title Settings.
Also you can specify not indexing the archives or deep pages of your website with “ No index sub pages of archives” check-box “Use meta keyword tag” will let you choose whether to display meta-keyword tag for your website or not. Mostly it is left unchecked as search engines generally avoid this tag. The other two options “noodp” and “noydir” are used to make sure that the DMOZ and Yahoo directories’ descriptions won’t be used for your website in search engine results. Last section “Clean up the <head>” is another combination of a number of options which you can check or uncheck as per your needs.
2. Home
This part is defining attributes for your homepage. Here you have to specify the compelling Title for your homepage under “Title template” option. Use “Meta Description Template” for specifying a good description for your homepage. Make sure to keep the title under 70 characters and description under 150 characters.
“Author highlighting” section will let you choose the author name which you want to be displays as author in Google search results. For this you need to link your WordPress website with your Google+ profile.
Next option “Google Publisher Page” is used to specify the link to the about section of your business’ Google+ page.
3. Post Types
This section is basically dealing with the SEO for your posts, pages and media elements of your website. You can control the robots noindex and nofollow settings from here. Also you can make your posts evergreen by disabling the feature to show date snippet for your posts.
4. Taxonomies
As your category and tags pages are duplicate so no need to plan something for them in advance for optimizing them against Panda update. Well under this option you will get choices to make these duplicate pages as noindex for not getting indexed by search engines and hence avoiding duplicity issue.
5. Other
If you are having a WordPress website or blog having a single author only then you should make the “Author Archives” option as no index and follow by checking the corresponding check box Also you should do the same with “Date Archives” check box as well for avoiding the duplicate content issue. Also you should make the special pages, like 404 error pages etc, as no index so as to avoid them getting displayed in search results.
3. Social
Here you can configure your Facebook open graph and Twitter meta tags as well. This will connect your website with these social profiles and you will definitely get a boost in search engines as well as Social signals are playing a great role at present.
4. XML sitemap:
Well most of the users (including me) like to use XML sitemap plug-in from Google. However if you like to include sitemap setting at one place with all other important stuff of your on-page activities then you can use this XML sitemap option. Also this plug-in enable you to add or remove certain parts to your sitemap.
5. Permalinks
This section of SEO by Yoast is going to handle the settings for your permalinks. It takes care of how search engines are going to handle the permalinks on your website. You should choose the options which are going to suit your needs. But you must gain a complete knowledge of every option before actually enabling or disabling it.
6. Internal link:
This part of SEO by Yoast basically deals with the navigational structure of your website. It specifies settings for navigational Breadcrumbs. You can define the breadcrumbs path setting here to make your navigation both user and search engine friendly. If you have hired a good SEO expert or Web design company then they will do inner linking themselves.
7. RSS:
This section is extremely useful to secure your website against the scrappers who might be looking to use your content raising the issue of duplicate content for you. This option will add the automatic content to your RSS like your website url, your author name, your post url etc. And if someone is going to copy your content then all this information about your website link etc will get copied too and hence specifying you as the real author of the content.
8. Import & Export
There may be chances that before installing SEO by Yoast, you must have been using some other SEO plug-in like HeadSpace2, All-in-One-SEO etc. You might be worry about losing your previous settings, but SEO by Yoast makes it extremely easy to import setting from other plug-ins and also export your WordPress SEO settings to use them again.
9. Edit files:
This option proves quite handy many a times as it gives you straight access to .htaccess file for your WordPress website. Hence you can directly edit your files like robots.txt and .htaccess files from this option.
Final Thought
Hope this guide makes all your questions clear about SEO by Yoast installation and features list. However I would strongly suggest that get a complete knowledge about each part before actually making any change and you need to be quite attentive while making changes to the settings of SEO by Yoast. I’m sure giving a proper attention will make it really easy for you to manage a lot of SEO task for your WordPress website.
I hope you have learned many things from this tutorial. If you have any better idea then let us know in comments. Thank you
Saif Ullah is an SEO & Internet Marketing expert working as a social media marketing manager. He loves to play with gadgets and Google. He has been running Saif Ullah Butt for sharing his personal adventures in Internet life. You can catch him on Facebook. Do you want some guidelines in SEO ? Get Quote Now for SEO !
Hi,
Thanks for sharing this very helpful information. Now, I can do the installing without asking help from others.
Sarah Park invites you yo check..How to Improve Decision Making Skills
Thanks for this interesting post. I loved it. This kind of input helps reader to drive its technical skills to a new level
Regards
Hello Dear
word press is one of the best content managment system for SEO but seo by Yoast is one of the best feature really thanks for the sharing me
Thanks & Regards
Sarika
Hi Saif,
I like that second dashboard Options for verifying Google Webmasters Tools, Bing Webmasters Tools and Alexa accounts for your website..
Thanks for the awesome tips…
Krunal invites you yo check..Oracle India Recruitment For Applications Developer 1
Yeah I like it too.
It makes every thing easy, No need to put codes in the header now
Dear Brother really great job u done. I was in search of this kind of tutorial / article about Yoast and you solved my problem. Thanks a lot and Allah bless u always
Adnan Shahid invites you yo check..Samsung Galaxy S III vs LG Nexus 4 vs iPhone 5 Who is the Best?
your welcome. I hope you will enjoy my blog in future more.
Thanks for the great tutorial, I recently installed the plugin but haven’t configured it properly yet, this will help. I’ve found this to be the best seo plugin around on WP, thanks!
Shannon Ryan invites you yo check..Changes To Canadian Mortgage Rules, An Interview With RBC’s Lino Contento
Yeah I tried to make it best
I hope you will enjoy other articles as well
WP seo by Yoast is by far the best wordpress plugin that can be used for SEO purposes. Installing it is not all Setting it up is a must and you break it down so well. Thanks for your guide Saif.
Cheers.
No problem buddy. I am glad that you like it.
saif,
I saw that yoast conflicts with thesis theme. i mean it disfigures the post in dashboard. in frontend its OK. is that the case with genesis and yoast. pls reply. helpful post on yoast.
regards
vinodh
vinodh invites you yo check..Http xml post request url
I dont have any conflict !
Well seo optimization with word press is good as the plugin called yoats is great and better than SEO all in one.
Many, many blogs that I see are not formatted with search engines in mind. Maybe it is because the blog owners are lazy, or possibly because the blog owners simply do not know what to do. But, WordPress SEO is actually very easy to accomplish. There is one major manual change you should make, then the rest can all be done with two plugins: WordPress SEO by Yoast and W3 Total Cache.
Tamara Calhoun invites you yo check..What is The Best Type of Traffic?
Thanks for sharing such an informative article about.Great post and very well thought through. Helped a lot!
I also use this way To Install the Setup of Plugin.its really good way to install the setup of wordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin.
At home business invites you yo check..Simple Suggestions to Employ For the Proftable Home Business
This is nice information I am also using in my wp sites this plug in as WP seo is now easy with this plugin now you just have to install and put your data in it.