Yoast configuration

5-Steps Guide – How to Properly Set Up Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Without good SEO optimization and rankings, you will not be able to reach any organic traffic at all. Without organic traffic, you will have no visitors or spend lavishly on ads. Since you have a WordPress site, it’s of crucial importance to choose the right SEO plugin that will make it easy for you to optimize your website and rank for appropriate keywords.

In the last few years, the Yoast SEO plugin positioned itself as one of the best SEO plugins in the marketplace.

Just have a look at these ratings:

It has over 5M users and the highest rates possible. Without a doubt, Yoast SEO is a great plugin that will supercharge your SEO statistics and rankings.

But, because of its robust platform and many valuable features, it is hard for first-timers to set up everything correctly.

That’s the reason why we’ve created this step-by-step guide. To make it easy for you to enjoy the fruits, Yoast SEO offers you.

Step 1 – Installing Yoast SEO

Installation is quite simple – like for every other WordPress plugin. Go to the “Plugins” section and click “Add new.” Type in the “Yoast SEO” search box, and for the first plugin that pops up, click “Install.”

Step 2 – Run the configuration wizard.

For first-timers, it’s best to run and complete Yoast SEO’s configuration wizard. At the top of your WordPress dashboard, you will see a little logo of Yoast.

Click here, and you will see a new screen:

It’s relatively easy to find out the configuration wizard. This nice-looking girl is waving to you, so this is your direction.

When you run the configuration wizard, you will see nine tasks that require competition to set up everything in place.

Don’t worry, this is going to be fast and funny at the same time.

Let’s go through all of the nine tasks.

Step 3 – Complete the configuration wizard

Step 3.1 – Choosing the site environment.

The first of the nine steps is to specify is your website design and construction are over or not. If you have finished designing your website, the Yoast SEO plugin would index your website to Google. That means that your website will become visible to Google itself.

In some cases, Google will automatically register your website after some time. But to speed things up a little bit, you can also index your website manually (or through Yoast SEO).

If your website is still under construction, it would be better to wait to index your website.

Either way, check the option that’s true for you.

Step 3.2 – Choosing the site type.

Site type will help Yoast SEO plugin optimize your website as much as possible for the types of sites your website belongs to.

As you can see in the image below, depending on the purpose of your WordPress website, there are various site types you can choose from.

Choose depending on your website.

Step 3.3 – Fill in your URLs

The next step is to fill in your company’s URLs. This could be extremely useful since you will repeatedly skip the constant part of adding these links.

Step 3.4 – Choosing the search engine visibility.

The fourth step is to choose what types of pages you want to show in the search engines. If you don’t know the differences, you can always leave the default setting. Nothing can harm you.

Step 3.5 – Will your site has multiple authors?

The next step is to choose will your website has multiple authors or not. Defining this will help Yoast set up everything you need for having multiple authors, so you don’t need to.

If you’re unsure, you can always choose yes.

Step 3.6 – Title settings

Now it’s the moment when you’re choosing your site name and title separators. Although it’s not recommended to have big variations, the site name can be different than your domain name. If your domain name isn’t the full name of your company, then you can change your site name, but don’t make it too much different.

Title separators are used in search engines to separate blog post titles from the site name. None of these separators affects SEO rankings, so you can choose based on your style. Some general separators are – and |.

Last three steps in the Yoast configuration wizard:

The previous three steps are not crucial for your SEO optimization at all. At the seventh step, Yoast asks you to subscribe to the newsletter.

It’s not a big deal if you don’t want to subscribe. In the next step, they’re offering you premium services. You can skip this part if you’re not willing to pay at the beginning.

In the last step, they congratulate you for completing the configuration wizard.

So, what are the next steps towards setting up your Yoast SEO account?

Let’s see!

Step 4 – Configure the Search Appearance

Search appearances are simple settings that will remain the same on the entire website. Although they are some basic settings, it’s crucial to set them up at the beginning.

In this case, Yoast helps you to configure them easily and remain them the same over and over again – so you don’t need to set them up each time when you’re publishing the blog post.

To set up search appearance settings, navigate to the top of your WordPress dashboard, click the Yoast’s logo, Choose “SEO Settings,” and then click “Search appearance”.

In the first “general” tab of Search appearances, you will see the title separators, the option to choose a website’s name, upload the logo, etc. Since we’ve already configured this in the configuration wizard, you can go to the second tab – Content types.

This is the moment when we’re choosing how the default search appearance for different types of pages is going to look like.

So, you can create search appearances for pages, posts, and other content types.

You already choose whether or not you want specific content types to allow showing in the search engines.

The second option is to decide whether or not to show the dates in the snippet preview. Usually, the practice is not to display dates in the URLs, meta descriptions, or titles. They’re just going to look messy, and they’re going to harm the user experience. So you can choose “Hide” here.

The SEO title is critical – the title is shown in the search engines. Here, you can choose the default pattern you want.

According to some general practice, your SEO title should contain “Title,” “Separator,” and “Site title.” In this order.

You can also set up some default meta descriptions here. But we don’t recommend you do that since each blog post’s meta description should be different. Since you have a limited number of characters in the meta descriptions, it’s best to save all of them for explaining your article – not mentioning the title or blog post name.

Repeat this step for every content type you want to show in the search engines.

The other tab in the Search Appearance folder is media, taxonomies, archives, breadcrumbs, and RSS. You can skip all of them since you’re not going to need them.

Everything else under the “SEO Settings” is already completed in the configuration wizard, so there is no need for additional information.

Congratulations, now you finished setting up your basic Yoast SEO settings!

Now it’s time to see how to use the Yoast SEO while writing your blog posts.

Step 5 – Writing a fantastic blog post under Yoast’s guidelines

Just under the box where you’re writing your blog posts, you will see Yoast’s box with recommendations that could improve your article’s SEO potential.

Under the first tab, called “SEO,” we can set up the focus keyword and related keyword phrases and edit the snippet preview.

Focus keywords will help you to optimize your article for the ideal keyword for your article. So choose your keyword carefully.

A snippet preview is how your article will look in the search engines. You can change the title, meta descriptions, and everything else you want to.

When you click on the SEO analysis, you will see the following content:

This is the best part of Yoast SEO. It gives you actionable advice on how to improve the SEO performance of your article and how to optimize it for better rankings.

It’s the same when you click on “Readability,” too.

You will see actionable ways to improve your writing skills and make your article as readable as possible.

The bottom line

As you can see, with a bit of help, it isn’t too hard to set up your Yoast SEO plugin.

It takes a couple of minutes only. Use it wisely to grow your web rankings and create fantastic content. Everyone at Premio is holding their crossed fingers for this!