Yoast SEO guide – why is it one of the coolest WordPress plugins?
WordPress is the undisputed king of the internet – it manages the lion's share of the content we so furiously scroll through every day. But CMS alone isn't everything – plugins that extend WordPress' capabilities provide complete control over all aspects of the website.
Basic features and capabilities of the Yoast SEO plugin
"Pure" WordPress isn't perfect. It's just a simple program that facilitates post distribution. However, after installing the YOAST SEO plugin, it becomes a true harvester for top Google rankings.
Basic optimization primarily involves modifying the <head> elements of each subpage—title, meta description, and, if necessary, meta robots. Further steps involve proper text optimization—heading structure, paragraphs, and other essential elements.
The next steps are to ensure the visibility of the post – setting appropriate rules for web robots, preparing additional descriptions for sharing on social media.
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To properly perform these procedures in WordPress, it's essential to use plugins that allow us to edit elements unavailable in the standard editor. One such plugin is the Yoast SEO plugin.
Installing and Initially Configuring the Yoast SEO Plugin
Installing the plugin is super simple – just download it directly from the WordPress database. After a quick installation and enabling the plugin, we can move on to optimizing. Where to begin?
Yoast allows us to connect our WP website with the most important tools – Google Search Console and its equivalents for the Bing and Yandex search engines.
The free version of the plugin has some functionalities disabled by default – to use all options, you need to enable them manually: in the main plugin window, click the Functionalities tab and go to the Advanced settings page section and move the slider to: enabled.
Additional options will allow for greater control of our CMS.
Homepage optimization – use Yoast!
In the Titles and Meta Tags tab , click the Home tab . Depending on the WP template you're using, the tab will contain a link to the home page editor or fields that allow you to enter the title and description for your home page.
By default, the formula for the title contains the information we added using the basic WordPress menu (in the section: General Settings > Site Title and Description ).
The next tab, "Content Types", allows you to prepare separate titles and meta descriptions for subpages containing different types of content – including posts, pages and media – graphics, videos.
The next "Taxonomy Types" allows you to add separate <head> elements for all the categories, tags, and post formats you create.
As with content types, here you can block automatically created subpages of each content type or taxonomy from robots. This solution makes it easier to control duplicates that can arise when, for example, your post falls into more than one category.
How do I set titles and descriptions for different content types?
Yoast SEO allows for full optimization of every page and post created in the CMS. Below the text editing window (or the page creator for a given page, depending on the solutions used in our WordPress) is the search engine optimization section.
The first tab provides an analysis of the page's health, assessed by green, yellow, and red dots. When optimizing a page according to the guidelines provided here, it's important to note that Yoast only analyzes the text placed in the text editor above and doesn't consider all the elements that make up a given subpage.
In other words, green dots don't indicate perfect optimization for Google's crawlers, but merely perfect alignment with the Yoast plugin guidelines. An additional note: Yoast doesn't always handle Polish!
The next tab is for optimizing the title, meta description, and meta keywords elements (if anyone uses them). It includes a visualization of our subpage as a search result and a field for editing individual elements.
To create a subpage title, you can use elements defined in the general CMS settings, such as the page name – %%sitename%% . The titles and descriptions created this way will give each subpage a unique character and allow you to highlight keywords.
Yoast SEO also allows you to prepare posts for sharing on social media and prepare individual titles and descriptions for them, different from those for search engines.
The Yoast plugin also allows you to control the visibility of specific pages to web crawlers. Using the plugin's menu options on a given post or page, you can control the content of the meta robots tag, allowing or disallowing indexing.
Here you can also complete the content of the canonical tag if it is different from the URL of the given subpage.
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Automatic XML sitemap in Yoast SEO – how to configure it?
After connecting your domain to Search Console and optimizing your homepage and subpages, the last element of basic preparation of your website for indexing in Google is creating a sitemap.
The map is generated automatically – and can be found at the following link: nasza-domena.pl/sitemap_index.xml . Using the Yoast SEO plugin panel, you can control its elements – add author subpages, post types, and exclude individual entries that you don't want displayed to search engine robots.
When generating a map for search engines using Yoast SEO, a bug sometimes occurs: after clicking on the link to the sitemap, a 404 error appears – the page you are looking for does not exist.
Getting rid of it is simple – just go to Settings -> Permalinks and, without making any changes, click Save Changes . This should fix the problem! The sitemap address should be added to the appropriate section in Google Search Console.
Summary – optimization with Yoast SEO and what next?
Sometimes, simply optimizing title and description elements can significantly improve your domain's search engine rankings. Preparing them with the Yoast plugin is simple and saves you time creating compelling content.
Of course, the plugin has many more possibilities and allows for much more extensive website optimization.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- Yoast SEO is a comprehensive WordPress plugin that allows you to effectively optimize the content and technical aspects of your website for Google search and social media.
- Installing Yoast SEO is simple and allows you to integrate your website with analytics tools and unlock advanced optimization features.
- Yoast SEO allows you to precisely set titles and meta descriptions for different content types and prevent duplicate subpages by managing crawler access.
- Yoast SEO offers tools for editing meta tags, analyzing content according to your own guidelines, and configuring technical parameters such as indexing and canonical links for individual subpages.
- The Yoast SEO plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap that you can freely configure and connect to Google Search Console to properly index your site.
