With over 350 million downloads recorded last fall, Yoast SEO for WordPress is one of the top 10 most popular plugins of all time. Officially, it is installed on more than 5 million websites to help optimize them for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The tool combines technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO, and its main advantage is that it can assist you with website optimization even if you have minimal knowledge in the field.

Yoast has an intuitive and easy-to-understand interface, and it helps you configure important SEO settings without writing code. The plugin also integrates the most important On-Page SEO elements from Google’s algorithm (essentially implemented as a set of rules/tips in the CMS based on search engine guidance for webmasters). This article will teach you how to properly configure Yoast SEO for visible results over time.

How to Install Yoast SEO

Installing the Yoast SEO plugin is easy and can be done directly from the Plugins menu:

• Log in to your WordPress account, and on the left-hand navigation menu, go to Plugins;

• Select “Add New”;
• In the search box, type “Yoast SEO.” The plugin will appear first in the recommended list;
• Click “Install,” and finally activate the plugin.

It’s worth noting that the plugin comes in both a free and a premium (advanced) version, but the free version is powerful enough to allow a range of fairly advanced SEO settings.

What are the paid options? The premium version allows you to manage indexing errors directly from WordPress and configure redirects for each indexing error.

Yoast SEO – Step-by-Step Configuration

Once installed, the plugin appears in the CMS as a new section in the WordPress menu called “SEO” and contains six elements in its dropdown list:

• General (notifications about implemented optimizations and warnings about issues that could affect site indexing);
• Search Appearance (helps optimize how Google perceives and indexes your content);
• Social (gives you the option to integrate your social media accounts with the plugin);
• Tools (here you can import and export settings from another plugin and quickly edit important SEO files like robots.txt and .htaccess);
• Premium (set up redirects for indexing errors, manage synonyms and related keywords, preview posts on Facebook or Twitter);
• Workout (the most important SEO configuration guide);

Article-Level Optimization

After installing Yoast, a new section appears at the bottom of the page that allows you to optimize the page’s SEO. This section provides an easy-to-use interface for performing basic article-level settings: creating and placing meta descriptions, title tags, open graph tags, configuring images for social networks (Facebook and Twitter), and integrating Schema.org markup.

Additionally, it provides a preliminary SEO analysis of the article based on the main keywords you enter in the Focus Keywords box, along with optimization tips for better organic ranking and improved content readability.

Choosing a Primary Keyword

The most important aspect is selecting keywords that are relevant to your article and business. Details about SEO keyword analysis and selection can be found here. Based on what you enter in this field, the plugin recommends SEO optimizations. Yoast SEO also offers many tools to help you optimize your website without writing code, such as adding page-level meta tags (meta description, title, and Open Graph tags).

Meta Title

The page title should be an accurate and concise description of the page’s content. It’s critical for user impression and SEO. Since title tags are extremely important for search engine optimization, following best practices can help achieve the desired results. The recommendations below cover essential aspects of optimizing title tags for both search engines and users.

Meta Description

Meta description tags are short descriptions of the page’s content. Keywords or phrases in this tag are not used by search engines for ranking, but the meta description is the primary source of text snippets displayed in search results. Essentially, they function as ad copy.

This is a very important part of search marketing. By creating compelling meta descriptions with relevant keywords, you can increase your click-through rate (CTR).

Meta descriptions are often truncated to a maximum of 160 characters in search results, so it’s recommended to follow the length limits suggested by Yoast SEO.

Image Optimization

Optimization doesn’t mean downloading images from photography sites or cameras and uploading them to your website backend. From an SEO perspective, there are three key considerations when posting images on your page:

1. The image size should not be too large to avoid slowing down page load times.

2. Each image should have an alt tag containing the title or a relevant keyword. If you don’t want to manually add alt tags, you can install a plugin that automatically inserts the page title as the alt attribute. Also, when linking to another page, the alt attribute takes the value of the anchor text.

3. Include “height” and “width” attributes. This is not mandatory, but without them, the browser won’t fully load the rest of the page until the image is completely loaded.

When published, the content loads first, with placeholders for images, giving the impression of faster page load speed—not necessarily for crawlers, but for users.

Adding Headings

Create headings designed to highlight the most important elements of your page content and help search engines understand the topic of your page.

It’s important to create unique headings:

• H1 tag – the most important heading on the page;
• H2 tag – the second most important heading on the page.

Internal Linking

Internal links are links that point to other pages within the same website. These links play a vital role in SEO. For example, on a news site, it’s recommended to link relevant information within the article by hyperlinking key phrases. Pay special attention to keywords that help the linked pages rank in search results, and include multiple links to different pages of your site.

Why? Because these links signal to search engines the relationship between pages. Avoid repeating the same link multiple times on a page, and don’t use different links on the same keyword. Also, site structure should be optimized to gain Google’s trust.

Breadcrumbs

In conclusion, Yoast SEO is a versatile and comprehensive plugin recommended by the Marketing PixelFlowAgency team for easily managing SEO settings in WordPress without writing code.