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Yoast are well-known developers among those who use WordPress as an engine for their sites and are actively working in the field of SEO. Founded the Joost de Valk team. Among the other plugins they have created for WordPress sites, their search engine optimization plugin has become the most popular. It crept up to 7 million downloads and scored 4.7 out of 5 in user ratings of all WordPress search plugins. The plugin is free to install and download from the WordPress.org library.
Control Panel
Immediately after installing the plugin, a new item called ‘SEO’ will appear in your admin panel. There you can open the plugin’s general settings and navigate to specific settings.
The most important options are collected in the Tracking and Security tabs. With the help of tracking, you can collect information about the use of the plugin and how the site works.
For security, there is also a Secutiry option for multi-author blogs so that your authors and editors don’t turn on redirects or turn off indexing on posts that don’t need to. If one of the authors causes you doubts, then put a mark next to this entry.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
The next block of options is related to titles and meta tags in WordPress. Here are the options available:
Force header rewriting: check this box if you want the plugin to replace the titles of all posts with a prefix or a title of the form specified in the plugin settings. We recommend enabling.
Check the “Noindex subpages of archives” checkbox to prevent subpages from appearing in search results. This will help reduce the amount of duplicate content on your site.
We also recommend using meta tags for keywords, they are not indexed by Google, but this is not the only search engine, so it’s worth working with keywords anyway.
We also recommend that you enable the “Add noodp meta robots tag” option throughout the site: this way Google will show the description of your site from other sources, such as DMOZ. If you want to show your own, and not third-party descriptions, then uncheck this box.
Disable the “Add noydir meta robots tag sitewide” option: it works similarly to the previous one, but only uses the description from the Yahoo! for your site.
Titles and Description
You also need to check the box next to “Titles and Description Clicking” in the ‘Home’ tab. These options are designed to work with the title and description of your page. Here you can specify the details and keep them unchanged.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
Specify here the title and description of your site as users will see them in search results. In this case, the following restrictions are imposed on the length of the description:
Title – 70 characters
Description – 160 characters
To check the length of the description and title, use the service metalength.com
If a specific page of your site is set as the home page (via Settings → Reading), then users will land on it, so the title and description should be formed specifically for it.
SEO Tip: Use the most important keywords in your heading and place them at the beginning of the heading. The fact is that Google pays more attention and importance to the starting words when determining the topic of the site. Incorrect description of the site and inaccurate selection of keywords in the titles can reduce the chances of the site to get into the correct search results.
As we previously mentioned, Google no longer has a ubiquitous use of keywords, but other search engines still do. So set up meta tags for posts and pages by separating them with a comma.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
It is best to do this according to a certain universal pattern. This template looks like this:
%%title%% – for title
%%sitename%% – for site name
%%excerpt%% – for post announcement
%%sep%% – page X of X
Use this sequence to create titles for your posts.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
For the rest of the options, don’t include ‘noindex’ (unless you don’t want your site to appear in search results).
Also, do not enable the authorship option if you do not want to display information about the author of the post in Google Rich Snippets (the same applies to the date and time of publication).
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
Once you’ve set up all the posts in the pattern mentioned above, save the settings. The taxonomy tab refers to your tags and post categories. You can also create your own taxonomy.
Avoid duplicating content here, so it’s best to exclude the taxonomy page from indexing. To do this, check the boxes next to ‘noindex, follow’ for each taxonomy.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
In the ‘Other’ tab, the same can be done for the pages with the author’s archive.
Social settings
With this plugin, you will be able to link your WordPress site to various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup Guide
If you have profiles and pages in these social networks. networks, then fill in this information with the appropriate links and data. It works well for search ranking by filling in data about the author of posts as part of the Google Authorship option.
