WordPress Yoast SEO Plugin - Instructions for beginners
With our instructions for the Wordpress plugin Yoast SEO you optimize your website for search engines like Google. It is one of the best free SEO tools out there for WordPress. With our instructions, even beginners can use the extensive tool.
1. Yoast SEO Plugin: installation and import
- First, install the Yoast SEO plugin. To do this, open the "Plugins" in your dashboard and search for "Yoast SEO" in the top right. The plugin (see picture) can then be downloaded and installed free of charge with one click.
- If you had previously used "HeadSpace2", "All-in-One SEO", the "WooThemes SEO Framework" and "wpSEO" as an SEO plugin, you do not have to re-enter all settings manually.
- After installation, you will find the "Import and Export" function under the "Tools" menu item. Select the "Import from other SEO plugins" tab and tick the plugin you have been using.
- If you click "Import", the settings are applied.
2. The dashboard of Yoast SEO Plugin - an overview
Once you have installed and activated the Yoast SEO plugin, click on the Yoast SEO menu in the dashboard of your WordPress site. You will now see various tabs labeled "Dashboard", "General", "Functions", "Your Info", "Webmaster Tools" and "Security".
- Under each of the tabs you will find the link "Help Center". There you will find videos and a knowledge database on the individual subject areas.
- If you select the "General" tab, you will find the configuration wizard there. This will guide you through the configuration of Yoast SEO in 10 steps, where all basic settings are made. This includes, for example, your name or that of the company and the integration of social profiles.
- If you switch to the "Functions" tab, you will see some functions that you can switch on and off using the slider. Activate "Advanced Settings Pages" and the "Admin Bar Menu".
- One tab further takes you to "About you". Here you can enter the data of your website. The configuration wizard has already done this, you can still make adjustments here.
- Enter your authentication codes for the various search engines under the heading "Webmaster Tools". If your website is already verified, you can skip this point.
- Finally, there is the "Security" tab. If the Yoast SEO meta box is activated here, it will be visible to other authors on your website. The authors can then redirect articles or exclude them from indexing. If colleagues are working on your side, you should better deactivate this point.
3. Optimize Titles & Metas with the Yoast SEO Plugin
There are also several tabs under Titles & Metas. Let's go through them step by step.
- Under the heading "General" you should switch off the "Force reworking of titles" button. So make sure that the header.php displays the title in this form: "".
- The "Homepage" tab leads you to the page title and the presentation of the meta description. Here you can leave the default for the page title, it will probably be "%% sitename %%". You do not need to change anything in the presentation of the meta description either.
- The section "Item types" follows. This includes articles, pages and media. In this section you control the indexing of the article types. You also define the page titles and the meta descriptions here.
- The tab "Taxonomies" leads you to similar setting options. This is about whether the categories you created should be indexed or not.
- In the "Archive" tab you will also find the option to assign the meta data and the automatic assignment of page titles. No search engine likes duplicate content. To avoid this, you should set the slider to "noindex".
- The last point is called "Other". Again, you should set "Archive subpages" to "noindex". In this way, the visitor actually gets to the first page when he reaches your website via a search engine. You should also deactivate the two items "Use meta keywords tag" and "Add meta robots tag for the entire website" here.
4. Set up social - Facebook, Twitter & Co.
These settings are made quite quickly in the individual tabs.
- Under "Accounts" enter the profiles of the social media to which you are logged in. These are then embedded by the plugin in JSON-LD format on the homepage to draw the attention of search engines to your profiles.
- The next tab is titled "Facebook". You should activate the "Add Open Graph Meta Date" button so that the most important Open Graph meta data such as language, title and URL are automatically added to the head area of the page. In this area you can also determine the image, title and description that should be used by default when you share the homepage on Facebook.
- The Twitter card meta data is also stored in the head area in the "Twitter" tab by activating the switch.
- Under "Pinterest" you have the possibility to verify your website for the Pinterest network. If you have activated the "Add Open Graph Meta Data" option under "Facebook", this also applies to Pinterest, since the network also uses the Open Graph metadata.
- You can store your Google+ profile under the "Google+" tab.
5. Set up XML sitemaps
In order to be able to make any settings, the "XML sitemap function" slider must be activated and accepted as a change. The Yoast SEO now automatically creates a Sitemap.xml file.
- Under "User sitemap" you have the option of creating a user-specific sitemap for all authors. You can then filter according to user roles whether they should be created in the sitemap.
- The "Item types" tab leads you to the setting of which item types should be included in the sitemap and which should not.
- The "Excluded posts" section enables you to exclude individual posts from the sitemap.
- Under the tab "Taxonomies" you determine which taxonomies should be included in the sitemap and which should not. There is only one text box, so separate the WordPress ID numbers of the posts with commas.
6. Advanced - Breadcrumbs & Permalinks
The point "Advanced" leads you to the settings for the breadcrumb navigation and the permalinks.
$config[ads_text5] not found- The "Breadcrumbs" section allows you to activate breadcrumbs at all, if this is not possible in the theme you are using. You then have various setting options, such as defining the separator or whether the last page should be particularly emphasized.
- You can optimize your site's permalinks under the heading "Permalinks". For example, you can remove the term "category" from the URL category here. If you activate "Forward attachment URL to the URL of the parent article / page", attachments of an article are assigned to the corresponding URL of the parent article. The two slide switches for "Stop words in the title" and "Remove the? Replytocom variables" should be set to "Remove" to clean the permalinks.
- Now the "RSS" section is still missing. Here you have to work with placeholders. You can choose from "%% AUTHORLINK %%", "%% POSTLINK %%", "%% BLOGLINK %%" and "%% BLOGDESCLINK %%".
7. Tools
The menu item "Tools" provides three tools.
$config[ads_text6] not found- With the "File Editor" you can easily edit your .htaccess and robots.txt files. However, the rights on the server must be set correctly. However, before changing anything on these files, you should make a backup beforehand.
- The next tool is "Import and Export". Save your settings with the "Export" tab. If you also want the metadata of your taxonomies to be saved, check the "Include taxonomy metadata" box. If you click on "Export Yoast SEO Settings", the settings.zip will be downloaded. This file can be imported again later, so that all settings are adopted.
- The "Bulk Processing" tool shows you a list of all your pages. In the "Title" tab you can edit one or more titles and save the changes directly. Under "Description" you can see the descriptions of all URLs in the overview and can also edit them here.
8. Search console
Call the menu item "Search Console" to connect the plugin to the Google Search Console. A list of current crawl errors is then displayed in the backend. This makes it much easier to correct errors.
9. Extensions
With this point "Extensions" you now have the option to add new features to the plugin. In contrast to the Yoast SEO plugin, the extensions are usually subject to a fee. You can choose from video SEO, news SEO and local SEO.
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