Hey there and thanks for watching WPBeginner. Today you'll learn how to
install and setup WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.
Aside from great content on your site, you need to make sure it's properly setup and
optimized for search engines.
The most comprehensive plugin to handle this is WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.
Please note that these steps are what WPBeginner recommends and other experts might have their
own preferences.
If you are moving from another SEO plugin or theme framwork like genesis, thesis, or
headway then you want to install the SEO data transporter to move all your seo data over
before deactivating it.
If you have a brand new site, you can skip that step.
After installing and activating the plugin, you'll see this SEO link in the admin area,
we can go to seo-->dashboard to get started.
Under general settings
they have an introduction tour that you can follow to get an overview of the plugin.
And here you can reset to default with one click if you need to start over with the setup.
Next we have tracking, if you want to send anonymous info to them you can check this, we have it unchecked.
Under security, you can disable the advanced part of the WordPress SEO meta box.
Checking it keeps other authors from making redirects and noindex items on your site.
Under webmaster tools this area lets you add your site to your webmaster
tools to some search engines. Just add the meta code for each here and click save settings.
If you site is already in your tools area, you can ignore this section.
Next is the titles and meta,
for title settings, keep this uncheck as WordPress seo has auto-detected whether is needs to
rewrite titles for your pages.
Sitewide meta settings click use meta keywords tag.
Under clean up the head check hide shortlinks for posts and click save changes.
The home tab is where you fill out your title template or what shows at the top tab of your
home page. Add the meta description about your site here
and the meta keywords. The keywords are what your site is mainly about and then click save changes.
Post types lets you choose the default title template that all posts and pages will show,
the default meta description and keywords.
We recommend you use the WordPress SEO meta box on each post and page to manually fill
this information out individually and I'll show you what that looks like in a minute.
For these, we can just use title for the template and that will bring in the post or page title
into the url. We'll click save changes here.
Next is the taxonomies area you can add the title template for these as well and as
for descriptions, the plugin picks up the descriptions from categories and tags.
We'll leave all default settings and click save changes.
Other are for special pages like author archives, date archives, search and 404.
We recommend disabling the author archive if you are a one blogger site.
We'll leave everything else the same and click save changes.
Next area we'll cover is social. With this we can add Facebook information.
Here you add a Facebook admin so you can bring the insights into the dashboard.
If you have a Facebook page, add the url as well as the image url and description.
To make it easier, you can also copy home meta.
Down here is the image url that will be used if there is no image in the post or page.
When you're done click save changes. Next is twitter,
we can check this to add twitter card meta. This is great if someone retweets your links
people can see a summary of your post like this and you can choose to just show the summary
or show the summary with an image.
Once we add that info, we'll click save changes.
For Google+ click add Google post meta data and add the url for the Google page for your
business. You'll also need to go into Google settings and add your site's url
in your about section. We'll save changes here.
Next we want to setup xml sitemaps. This is the fastest and easiest way to get your site
indexed and to notify search engines about your new content.
make sure you check this box.
For single author sites, check this to disable author/user sitemap.
The plugin automatically pings Google and Bing, but you can enable it to ping Yahoo
and ask.com as well.
You can exclude post types from being added to your sitemap like media attachments.
Here you can reduce the number of entries per sitemap page if you run into memory issues.
Next are permalinks. This area builds on the permalink structure. It assumes, you've gone
into the settings-->permalinks and changed it from the default link like this to something
like this.
here you can remove the /category/ from the url.
Next is enforce trailing slash, if you end your posts with .html then you probably want
to enforce the trailing slash.
Next is to remove stop words from the permalink. they are common words like a, an, the and Yoast
believes you create cleaner urls by doing this. We leave this unchecked as we disagree with that.
The redirect attachment URL to parent post all images have their own url, if you don't want
users to go to these image urls, then check this to redirect to the parent post.
the next item is good if you have a lot of comments on your site as it disables the threaded
replies from working for users who have javascript disabled, which is the case with most web crawlers.
For canonical settings, just leave as default and click save changes.
Next we have internal links. This is the breadcrumps and trail to the page you are on and is used
by the search engines like this: you have domain, blog, tutorials and this is where this article is found.
To get this, click enable breadcrumbs, choose a separator, here is the anchor text
for the homepage, prefix for the breadcrumb path.
This is prefix for archives and for search and for the 404 page.
And here you can choose to bold the last page of the breadcrump.
You can also choose to show the taxonomy for the breadcrumbs. We'll leave none.
we'll save changes.
The RSS feeds section adds content to all your posts in a feed before and after the
post so when a content scraper copies your content, there will be a link back to your
site, letting search engines and readers know where the original source is.
We'll leave the info here and click save changes.
Next is import/export. If you used another SEO plugin, this is where you can import those settings.
since we've spent a good amount of time setting all this up, you can also export all the settings
as a backup for other sites or for safe keeping if you mess these settings up.
Next is bulk title editor. This lets you quickly go into each post that you had on the site
before installing the plugin and update the titles to a better seo title. once you're
finished with them, you can click save all.
Same thing with the bulk description editor. This lets you give a better description of
what each post is about for better SEO.
The edit files allows you to create a robots.txt file if you don't have one and it lets you
edit your .htaccess file. As a beginner leave the defaults for your site.
Extensions are paid upgrades to take your site to the next level for SEO.
Now you want to make sure you are customizing each post and page as you write them. This
really maximizes the benefit of having the plugin installed.
for example, I'm creating a new post. You'll see this new box on every post and page. Fill
this out on ever post and be as detailed about it as you can.
give it a focus keyword, seo title, meta description, meta keywords.
This is your focus keyword in the article headding
page title, page url, content, meta description. Try to make all these yes.
Then look at the page analysis and see if you can get all these reds and yellows to
green. We'll leave advanced alone for now.
With social you can just keep what the default was from the settings.
And when you go to publish you'll also see this seo area...it will give you a quick red light
green light if your seo is good or bad for the site before you publish. try to get green
for every post...in your post writing workflow, make this one of your last things you do after
you write your articles to increase your search engine optimization.
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