Install SEO WordPress Plugin By YOAST

Setup and Install SEO WordPress Plugin By YOAST

Installation of WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

WordPress Plugin by Yoast is one of the best wordpress plugin that every blogger should have. Setup and Installation of SEO WordPress Plugin by Yoast is very simple. If will work more effectively if you configure it rightly. Today I am going to share with you some basic tricks of the great SEO Plugin By Yoast. This plugin has a lot of features, and having all the solution for blogger. We know that SEO is the root of every blog, deriving more traffic from Search Engine.

Some best features of SEO Plugin by Yoast are:

• Write better content with WordPress SEO
• Page Analysis
• Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization
• Meta & Link Elements
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS Optimization
• Breadcrumbs
• Edit your .htaccess and robots.txt file
• Social Integration
• Multi-Site Compatible
• Import & Export functionality
• Import functionality for other WordPress SEO plugins
• WordPress SEO Plugin in your Language!

For best configuration just follow the given steps.

How to use SEO WordPress Plugin By Yoast

1. Installation:

• Upload the wordress-seo folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
• Activate the WordPress SEO plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
• Configure the plugin by going to the SEO menu that appears in your admin menu

2. Setup:

a. Data Upload

If you have install other SEO Plugin Like All in One SEO Plugin or other plugin that is come with a theme frame work,  e.g Genesis, Thesis, or Headway controlling your blog SEO. Go to the setting and then one of the above plugin and download data file as export.

Upload data from other Plugin

Now come to the new one ( SEO wordpress Plugin by Yoast) and upload the file.   Now you are done. Now come to the most Important section.

3. General Settings

Go to dashboard, then SEO wordpress Plugin by Yoast and Select General Settings:

General setting for SEO Plugin by Yoast

 Look at the above image, you will see that we have checked on “Use Meta Keyword Tag“. This option will allow you to see meta keywords in Post edit section of your blog. When you are writing new content in wordpress editor, you will see the option.

4. Webmaster 

This is basically for Beginner, in this section of the plugin you can verify your blog in different Search Engine.  If you know a little bit about SEO then you will also know about webmaster. Major Search Engine like, Google, Yahoo, and being have their own web master tools, here you can add your blog and see all your detail about your blog.

SEO Plugin by Yoast, Webmaster Tools

5. Title Settings

This section is under the SEO tab, This section show your title of pages, post and template. If you don’t know what to do? then leave it by default that our title can be rewritten on each of our page. When you go to your theme editor and then header.php and here your title of the page will look like this:

Source code

<title><?php wp_title(”); ?></title>

Title Setting SEO Plugin By Yoast

If you don’t know about theme editing and modifying then simply check the box “Force Rewrite title”.

In next section you will see the title for our homepage. Here you can change everything according to your choice. Your homepage title, keywords, static pages, description and template description.

Singular Page setting in SEO WordPress Plugin By Yoast

Keep your title of Homepage under 70 characters and description under 160 characters. Because Search engine are having problems if your homepage title or description goes long over the mentioned characters. Note that don’t repeat words again and again. Just define your blog exactly.

Next step is Taxonomies:

In this section we will define template for taxonomies title and description.

Taxonomies Title SEO WordPress Plugin By Yoast

After filling the Taxonomy Title section we will define the next section which deals with:

Author Archives, Date Archives, Search Pages, and 404 pages.

Special Pages SEO wordpress Plugin by Yoast

 See the above image and setup this section just like showing in this image.

Now come to next section.

6. Indexation

This section is very important, little mistake is not acceptable. Be careful and just follow the rule.

Indexation Rules SEO WordPress Plugin by Yoast

 we have minimized the tab called Plugin Settings. The reason for that is because it has a check box to remove all the direction and notes. You should do the same because you don’t want to check the box without knowing and then worry (Ofcourse, if you uncheck the box everything comes back). This section is specially important to avoid duplicate content in Search Engine.

Social Plugin Settings

This section will allows you to add Facebook OpenGraph Meta Data to your site. This will prevent all the issues of facebook thumbnails not showing. Or a wrong title, or description showing while sharing your posts on Facebook.

Social Plugin Setting

You are probably wondering why you need the Admin ID? That is because you can access cool data about your site from Facebook which will help you maximize your traffic from Facebook.

Internal nofollow settings

Next section  is the internal nofollow settings and archive settings. For those who do not know, nofollow is the way to stop diluting your page strength on links that does not deserve the juice. It is an advanced setting. Let’s take a look at the setting below:

Internal Nofollow SEO WordPress Plugin By Yoast

 We are checking all the boxes in the internal nofollow settings area. Let’s take a look at why. We are nofollowing login and registration links is because there is no need for your admin page to get any page rank. You should rather pass a higher juice to your other pages such as about page, or your services page. By checking that box, we nofollow few useless links that appeared on all pages that were diluting your page strength. On a lot of WordPress themes, there are links pointing to the comment section. By checking the second box, we nofollow all those links. Often we see sites using the Meta widget in their sidebar that contains your RSS link, login link, WordPress.org link etc. By checking the third box, we nofollow all of those links as well. Most themes give credit to WordPress.org in their footer anyways, so adding a nofollow on one additional link that you have no option to remove is not mean at all.

Second thing that you see in the image above is Archive settings. This section is powerful, so make sure you know what you are doing. If you run a single authored blog, there is no use for your author profile as we have specified above in the indexation rules settings (which is why we set those to noindex). Well Joost extend the option for you to set a 301 redirect to all author archive pages to the homepage. This is great if you run a single-authored blog, so you might as well do it. But be aware, if you have a multi-author blog, we advise against doing so. Disabling date based archives is individual discretion as well. If you want to give your user an option to view your blog in a monthly archive fashion, then do not check the box. Note, you are not hurting your blog by unchecking this box because we have already set those date archive pages to noindex in the indexation settings. Lastly, you see we have minimized the Robots Meta Settings. You should do the same if you are a novice because you can seriously mess things up by accidentally checking one of those boxes.

Next, we will take a close look at the Clean Head Section Settings. By default, there is a lot of stuff added in your site’s head section that might not be necessary for everyone. Let’s take a look in the image below to see the settings we recommend:

Clean Up Head Section SEO WordPress Plugin by Yoast

First as you notice, we have left the RSD links and WLW links unchecked. That is because if you are using remote editors or windows live writer, you need those to be in the header. You can hide the shortlink of posts if you want. Do not Hide RSS Links if your WordPress site is a blog (which in most cases would be).

7. Sitemap

Sitemaps are essential for your WordPress site. Normally we would recommend you to add a plugin like Google XML Sitemap, but Joost thought ahead and put it this feature in his plugin. By default it is unchecked, so you need to make sure that you check the box to enable it. Once you check the box, a bunch of features will appear like in the image below:

Sitemap SEO WordPress Plugin by Yoast

8. Permalinks

Just to be clear, we are talking about the Permalink settings in Yoast SEO tab, not in the setting tabs. This plugin adds on to those that are built-in to WordPress. This section does not allow you to create SEO Friendly URLs in WordPress. It assumes, that you have already done that. So let’s take a look at what type of features this section offers:

Permalink Settings Seo WordPress Plugin by Yoast

9. Internal Links Settings

This entire page is all about adding Breadcrumbs which are great for internal linking because it defines a clean path or trail to the page you are on.

Internal Links Settings SEO WordPress Plugin by Yoast

 First thing first, you need to Enable Breadcrumbs, so check YES. Next we are setting a separator between breadcrumbs, and we choose to separate it by arrows like ». You can use /, commas, ~, or whatever you like. Anchor Text for Homepage, should be your site name. So please change that field. Prefix for the breadcrumb path, is not necessary. But it is good to let your user know what is this thing that is popping out at them. So we are using the phrase “You are Here:”. Prefix for Archives is “Archives for”, so when someone actually visits the archives page, it shows “Archives for October 2010″. Prefix for Search page works in a similar way because the user will see “You searched for: “the term they searched for”. Breadcrumb for 404 page will show that as a result. If you are using WordPress as a CMS that has a blog section added to it, then you have an option to remove the Blog page part from the breadcrumb. However, we do not see it necessary.

 10. RSS Settings

This section is very important on the point view of SEO. In this Section you can add Your RSS. Joost wanted to leave no room for mistake, so he added one of his other plugins RSS Footer functionality to this plugin to give you full SEO advantage. So let’s take a look at what this tab has to offer.

RSS Settings SEO wordpress Plugin by Yoast

 Before the upgrade of this plugin, Joost had options like Noindex comment feeds, noindex rss feeds, and ping search engines. In an update, he took these features out because it is best practice to noindex all feeds. The feeds should never be indexed. Also, we are already pinging search engines when a new post is published, so no need to have that option. If you are using FeedBurner, it does that regardless.

Now all you see is controlling the content of your RSS Feed. This allows you to add backlinks to yourself in your feed content because most content scrapers are using your feeds to steal your content. This way, you will get backlinks from their site, and google will know that you are the original source. There are options to add your author link, Post link, blog link, and blog description. So get creative. He give you an option to add the text either above the content, or below the content. So it is your pick. This can also be used to add advertisement to your RSS feed, so you get additional impressions from the scraper’s page.

That’s all. You are done now. If you need further assistance then just leave comment here.

Now your turn which one is your favourite WordPress SEO Plugin?