Setting Up Yoast SEO 7.1 in WordPress

To install Yoast SEO automatically, Go to your Website dashboard and, GO to Plugins> Add New> Search for ‘Yoast SEO’> Find Yoast and click on Install Now. Once it is installed, Activate it.

To install it manually, download Yoast SEO Free from its website or WordPress.

The Set-Up panel of Yoast SEO has changed quite a lot in the latest version of the plugin. You can see the Yoast SEO on your WordPress Dashboard. The screenshot on the side shows the options available for the configuring the plugin.

To start setting up click on SEO with the Yoast logo. This takes you to General Settings page, which contains 3 tabs namely:

Dashboard | Feature | Webmaster Tools

First, let’s jump to the First-time SEO configuration wizard. Configuration should not be confused with the complete SEO setup. It is just a minor checkpoint which ensures that you touch most of the important settings. Thus, you should ensure that you are choosing the right option for better performance of the plugin. This consists of 12 simple steps in which the next follows when you click on next. This is not a one-time configuration. You can configure it n number of times. The wizard contains:

Next up in the General Settings we have Features of the best SEO plugin for WordPress.

We’ll discuss these features in details in the next installment of this article. For now, most of these features here are available in the pages you edit. You can either enable or disable them from here. The screenshot shows few of them. As I am an author, the Advanced Settings button is missing.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the third option says Cornerstone Content.

The third option in General Settings, we have Webmaster tools. It asks for your search engine verification code. This is required as this will allow the plugin to communicate with the search engine. It also helps you to check the site and allows the plugin to detect malware if any. You can get them if you haven’t it yet by following the links below.

‘Search Appearance’ houses settings related to how your homepage or your content is going to look in a google search. The way your website’s content appears is based on the XML Sitemap you submit to Google. This submission becomes efficient becomes easy with Yoast SEO. While you set up the Search Appearance here, you actually check through all the components of your website. The section includes:

General | Content Types | Media | Taxonomies | Archives | Breadcrumbs | RSS

With this option, you can easily change the homepage title and its meta description from within the SEO plugin.

As discussed earlier, knowledge graph appears on the right side of any search page. If you are a person, you can enter your name and if you are a company you can include the company name with the logo from the settings page.

You can choose if you want to show your contents in the Google search or not. Apart from that, you get to set templates for the title and meta description. This is available for your Posts, Pages, Donation forms, Products, and Custom Post Type Archives. You will be able to:

Since in WordPress, any image added to your website is converted to an URL, Yoast provides you an option where you choose if you want to redirect the media attachment URL to the media itself. Since the media URL stores no relevant information, you can choose to redirect it to the attachment itself.

If you have relevant information and wish to show Media in search results, you can enable the option. With this, you get options like adding a

Taxonomies deal with broader sections of your website content. You can either choose to show these in google search or choose to exclude them from XML sitemaps. The red boxes in the screenshot below show options that you can enable for indexing by Google. You also get to add a title template and a meta description template for each of these.

Main Features in Archive are:

What did Hansel do while he and Gretel were in the woods? Yes, he dropped pieces of bread so that they could find their way back home. The concept of tracking your present locations and getting back to the home page is, therefore termed Breadcrumbs. For instance, to reach to the breadcrumbs settings page you need to follow: WordPress Dashboard> SEO> Search Apperance> Breadcrumbs.

Once you enable Breadcrumbs, Google will show the entire path of the particular post, page, any form or the product. But for its successful implementation, you are required to have a structured data.

You can add a default content that will appear in your RSS feed here. You also get an option to add a content to appear at the end of each post. In addition to this, you get few helpful variables that you can add to the RSS feed settings.

To allow Yoast SEO to use Google Search Console Information, you can enter your Google Authentication Code here. To get that, click on Get Google Authentication Code, you will be asked to allow access to your Google Search Console. Once you allow access, you will receive the Authentication Code that has to be pasted in the box given in the plugin.

As the name suggests, add all your social media handle to Yoast SEO here. Needless to mention, we have seen a similar setting during the configuration wizard setup. The section here is further sub-divided into:

Accounts | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Google+

In Accounts, you can add the URL of all important social account of your company or your own individual account.

Further, you can customize the preview of the post you share with a link to your website. You get to add an Image, Title, and a Description. Apart from this, you can add a default image for posts which don’t contain any image.

Thus you get one of the easiest ways to optimize your posts on the mentioned social media.

Tools

This is one of the most important sections in the plugin. This enables you to:

Here is a break down of available settings.

Import and Export | File Editor | Bulk Editor | Text Link Counter

So with Yoast SEO, you can directly edit or add robot.txt and stop indexing of desired pages any time from the plugin itself. Further, you can also edit the contents of your existing .htaccess.

The section allows you to bulk edit the Title and the Meta Description of each page, post, and product from within Yoast SEO.

Text link counter allows you to count the links in all of your text content. Once you click on the button ‘count links in your texts’, you basically recount the number of links.

You can choose to move to Yoast SEO Premium based on this official difference table.

When we talk about WordPress SEO tools, Yoast SEO 7.1 is definitely the best SEO plugin for WordPress. SEO settings for the contents of your page determine your visibility on search engines. And Yoast SEO setup is one of the easiest to carry out. Apart from this, WordPress SEO tools like robot.txt and .htaccess can be directly edited using this SEO plugin.

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