WordPress is SEO friendly, but not by default.

Having WordPress installed is half of the battle. You have to optimize WordPress for SEO.

The main thing you have to do is, install & configure a WordPress SEO plugin.

There are a lot of SEO plugins out there, but Yoast SEO is the best of all of them. With over 5 million installs, it has become the best SEO solution for WordPress.

WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast has everything to make your WordPress blog SEO friendly. In this post, I will show you how to install and configure Yoast SEO. Even if you are using Yoast plugin for a while, this tutorial will help you to get the full benefit of the plugin.

Before going further, let’s take a look of some of the SEO features offered by Yoast.

• Setting Meta Title and Description for Posts/Pages including Homepage.
• Verifying sites on webmaster tools.
• Meta Robots for Different Post Types.
• Integrating Social Profiles with Your Site.
• Creating & Configuring XML Sitemaps.
• Configuring Breadcrumbs, Permalinks, and RSS.
• Editing Robots.txt and .htaccess file.
• Connecting WordPress site with Google Search Console and many more.

How to Install Yoast SEO (Free Version)

Getting started with Yoast is very easy. At first, you have to install and active Yoast SEO plugin from WordPress dashboard. You can follow our guide on How to Install WordPress Plugin.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, you will notice a new option named “SEO” in your WordPress Admin panel.

Having this tab in the admin panel means you’ve installed Yoast SEO successfully.

How To Set Up Yoast SEO (Free Version)

Setting up Yoast SEO plugin is extremely easy. But it will take sometimes to configure the plugin to get maximum benefits. Here I will show the step by step process to setup Yoast SEO. You will see images for every step. It’s a photo tutorial. Most of the settings I will be selected are based on my personal recommendation. You can ignore anything that you don’t like. Every time you make a change, click on “Save Changes” button to save the setting.

1. Dashboard

Now click on “Dashboard” from “SEO” option. Here you will find several tabs – General, Features, Your Info, Webmaster Tools, & Security. Let’s start with the General tab.

1. Dashboard Tab

From the General tab, you can take help from Yoast SEO team to configure Yoast plugin. But you don’t need to do that as I am going to share it with you.

This tab will show SEO problems of your site if you have any and it will also show the notifications.

You don’t have to do anything on this tab.

2. General Tab

The next tab is General Tab. From here you can enable “Count links in your to texts” see the number of internal links in your post and the number of links to your post. It will help you to improve your site structure.

Click on “Save changes” and you don’t have to do anything else on this tab.

3. Features Tab

Yoast SEO comes with a lot of features. You can enable or disable features from here.

By default, Yoast SEO keeps all the features enable except the “Advanced settings pages”. I’d recommend you to enable that features too.

Click on “Save Changes” button to save your settings.

You will notice that advance setting pages have been added to “SEO” option.

4. Your Info Tab

Then move to “Your Info” tab. Here you need to provide your website name and the company or person behind it.

Your website name is generally your site’s title. If you don’t provide any name, Yoast SEO will automatically use your site’s title as the name.  You can also provide an alternative name. If you’ve just changed brand name, you can use this.

Then you need to choose whether the website is run by a company or a person. If you choose ‘Company’, it will ask you to provide company name and logo. If you choose “Person”, just enter your name.

Click on the “Save Changes” button.

5. Webmaster Tools Tab

The next tab is “Webmaster Tools”. You can verify different webmaster tools like Google, Bing, and Yandex from here. Webmaster tools provide detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on different search engines.

Verifying your site in webmaster tools is a bit difficult. If you want to do it manually, you have to add a meta tag or upload a file to your site. But Yoast plugin makes it insanely easy. All you have to do is, enter the meta code provided by search engines.

Read: How to Verify WordPress Blog on Google Webmaster Tools

Click on the “Save Changes” button.

5. Security Tab

The next tab is “Security”. There is only one option which is disabling the advanced part of the Yoast SEO meta box. Checking the box will prevent your authors and editors to redirect posts and noindex them. It’s important to check the box if you are running a multi-author blog.

Click on “Save Changes”.

2. Titles & Metas

“Titles and Metas” section is the most important part of this plugin. It has several tabs under in it. I will cover all of them one by one. Now click on “Titles & Metas” from “SEO” option.

1. General Tab

The first tab is “General”.  You can set “Title Separator” from here. Yoast SEO can auto-detect whether it needs to rewrite the titles of your pages. By default it is disabled. I’d suggest you to go with the default setting.

You can choose “Title Separator” from here. Title Separator is the symbol that separates post title and site name. This symbol is shown in the search results. If you have no idea about this, check the image below.

Choose the symbol that you want to show in the search results.

Click on “Save Changes”.

2. Homepage Tab

The next tab is “Homepage”. From here, you can configure the Meta title and meta description that will be shown on search engines.  While you can use variables to generate title and meta description of the site, I’d recommend you to enter the exact text. I mean what you want to show in the search results.

Google shows up 70 characters in title and 156 characters on meta description. So it’s recommended to keep your title and description within these characters.

Click on “Save Changes”.

Here’s the screenshot of meta title and description of RoadToBlogging.com.

3. Post Types Tab

Then move to “Post Types” tab. By default, WordPress has several post types like posts, pages, media etc. Yoast SEO allows you to set meta titles for these post types. I’d suggest you not to change anything here. Just keep this as it is.

Yoast SEO also allows you to set title and meta for each post/page separately. It adds a Yoast SEO Meta Box under post editor. It is recommended for SEO to set meta title and description manually for each post/page. I will discuss it later. 

If you are using more custom types in WordPress, you will see the section here. For example, I am using Thirsty Affiliate plugin  to manage affiliate links. This plugin adds a custom post types named “Affiliate Links”. Yoast SEO makes it easy to handle these post types. I don’t want search engines bots to follow affiliate links and index them. So I will check the “Meta Robots” box to prevent bots to index/follow the links.

Click on “Save Changes”.

4. Taxonomies Tab

The next tab is “Taxonomies”. You can set meta titles for categories, tags, format etc from here. I prefer going with the default setting. But it depends on your SEO plan. It’s a good practice for SEO to keep tags and categories as noindex .

Click on “Save Changes”.

5. Archives Tab

On the next tab “Archives” you can set meta titles for author archives, date archives, search pages and 404 pages. If you are running a multi-author blog, you can set a meta title for Author archives. Otherwise, don’t change anything here.

If you are running a single author blog, you should check disable author archive as it will be same as your homepage. It will prevent duplicate content problems.

Click on “Save Changes”.

6. Other Tab

The last tab on “Titles & Metas” section is “Other”. The most important thing of this tab is noindexing the “Subpages of archives”. Other settings are fine.

3. Social

Yoast SEO has added this feature recently. This allows you to integrate your site with your social profiles.

1. Accounts Tab

The first tab under social setting is “Accounts”. You need to provide your available social profiles’ URLs to inform Google about your social profiles.

2. Facebook Tab

The next tab is “Facebook”. The first thing you need to do is enabling “Add Open Graph meta data” . It will add a metadata on your site’s <head> section. Facebook will use this data when a page of your site is shared on Facebook.

You can add a title, description, and image for Facebook open graph meta tags from here. You can also add an image for the post/page being shared on Facebook but does not contain any images. To have access on Facebook Insights, you need to specify a Facebook admin. It could be a user or a Facebook app.

Click on “Save Changes”.

3. Twitter Tab

On “Twitter” tab, you can enable Twitter card meta data. You can also choose the card type to use. I prefer using summary with large image.

Click on “Save Changes”.

4. Pinterest Tab

The next tab is “Pinterest”. You need to confirm your website ownership to verify your Pinterest account.

5. Google+ Tab

The last tab is “Google+”. Check the box to Add Google+ specific post meta data.  If you have Google+ page for your site, enter the URL here and link it on your Google+ page’s about page.

4. XML Sitemaps

The next section is XML Sitemaps.

An XML sitemap contains all URLs of pages/posts in your site. It helps search engine bots to crawl your URLs and index them quickly. There used to be a time when we need to use a several plugin to create XML sitemap in WordPress. But Yoast SEO makes it super easy.

1. General Tab

Here you need to make sure that “XML sitemap functionality” is enabled. Then it will automatically generate a sitemap for your site.

• How to Submit Sitemap on Google Webmaster Tools
• How to Submit Sitemap on Bing Webmaster Tools

You can check your sitemap from here by click on “XML Sitemap” button.

2. User Sitemap Tab

On the next tab “User sitemap”, check the box to disable author/user sitemap.

3. Post Types Tab

The next tab is “Post Types”. From here you can disable post types that you don’t want to add on your sitemap. By default, Yoast SEO disables Media (attachment) from sitemaps. You can also disable custom post types. For example, I have three custom post types (Affiliate links, Thrive Lightboxes, & Polls) that I don’t want to add on sitemaps.

Click on “Save Changes”.

4. Excluded Posts Tab

From the next tab “Excluded Posts”, you can exclude posts from the sitemap. Just enter the Post IDs that you don’t want to show on the sitemap. Here’s how to find Post IDs in WordPress.

Click on “Save Changes”.

5. Taxonomies Tab

The last tab of this section is “Taxonomies”. I prefer not to include taxonomies like tags, categories etc on the sitemap. But it totally depends on your SEO plan.

Click on “Save Changes”.

5. Advanced

The “Advanced” section allows you to configure breadcrumbs, permalinks, and RSS.

1. Breadcrumbs Tab

The first tab is “Breadcrumbs”. A breadcrumb is a series of connected links based on navigation of a website. If you enable breadcrumbs, it will be shown on your site as well as Google search results. Having breadcrumbs is very important for eCommerce site. Here’s how it looks in Google search.

Here at RoadToBlogging, we use breadcrumbs. If you want to use, just make it Enabled and setting will be displayed. You can go with the default setting.

Click on “Save Changes”.

2. Permalinks Tab

The next tab is “Permalinks”. It’s not the default permalink setting of WordPress. From here you can redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL, remove stop words and ?replytocom variables etc. I prefer going with the default setting.

3. RSS Tab

The last tab is “RSS”. It automatically adds links of your blog in your feed content. If someone steals your content from feed, you will get a backlink and Google will know that you are the original source of the content. The default setting is quite ok. But you can modify it if you want.

6. Tools

Yoast SEO has 4 built-in tools – Bulk editor, File editor, Import and Export and Recalculate SEO Scores. All of these tools are for advanced users. Only use these tools if you know what your are doing. Here are some details of these tools.

• Bulk editor: This editor allows you change the titles and descriptions of your posts in bulk. I don’t suggest this because it will create a lot of duplicate titles and descriptions.
• File editor: This tool allows you to change files like Robots.txt and .htaccess file. Always take a backup of your WordPress blog before editing these files. Don’t do anything here if you aren’t sure what you are doing.
• Import and Export: This tool helps you import SEO settings from other plugins and export SEO setting for re-use on other blogs.
• Recalculate SEO scores: This tool allow you to recalculate your SEO scores for all pieces of content with a focus keyword.

7. Search Console

Search Console connects your WordPress site with Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster tools).

Once you’ve added your WordPress site to Google Webmaster tools, you can verify it from Yoast SEO Search Console. Just click on “Get Google Authorization Code” and a box will be popped up. Copy and Paste the code on the box and click on “Authenticate”.

Then you will be asked to select a profile. Select the proper website and click on “Save Profile”.

Yoast SEO will fetch Google Search Console data into WordPress.

Using Yoast SEO for Individual Pages and Posts

The best thing about the plugin is, it allows you to configure SEO setting for every post/page. You have to use this feature to get the maximum SEO benefits from the plugin.

You will see “Yoast SEO” box under your page/post editor with fields like Snippet Editor and Focus Keyword.

Snippet Editor shows how your post will be shown on search engines like Google. It has 3 parts – Meta Title, Permalink, and Meta Description. You can edit each of them by just clicking on it.

• How to Add Meta Title and Description in WordPress
• How to Write a Good Meta Description That Increases CTR

You can also set a focus keyword to see how if your content is optimized for the keyword properly. You will see recommendations on “Content Analysis”.

It has advanced option that allows you to configure Meta Robots. You can use this option if you need to nofollow/noindex a post/page. Normally you don’t need to use this.

You can also set custom Title, Description, and Image for Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

That’s it. You are done.

Over to You

I hope this post helps you to set up Yoast SEO right way. If you have any questions regarding Yoast SEO, feel free to ask me via comment. And if you find this post useful, help me by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.