After we have made our perfect robots.txt, we should talk about the plugin, without which it is impossible to imagine the SEO optimization of a website created on WordPress for its successful promotion.
Among other things, the SEO by Yoast plugin combines several useful plugins at once, such as XML-map and “Breadcrumbs”, the importance of which is also undoubtful. So let’s get started on how to set up WordPress SEO by Yoast yourself and as efficiently as possible.
What is an SEO by Yoast WordPress Plugin?
First, let’s figure out what can be done with this plugin:
- Fill in meta tags for the home page.
- Fill in meta tags for each article and even, which is very important for headings! Thanks to this wonderful plug-in, you can very effectively move categories, which, as you know, can be fairly easily promoted by mid-range and even high-frequency queries.
- Customize Title view for categories, archives, and everything else.
- Remove “snot” from search engine results.
- Add “Breadcrumbs” without additional plugins.
- Add XML Map without using other plugins.
See how much WordPress SEO by Yoast can do? Let’s now talk about each point separately and in detail.
SEO by Yoast: plugin setup
Setting up the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin takes place in stages, it is recommended to go in the following direction.
We can safely skip the “General” section, there is nothing interesting there, so we go straight to the next item.
Headers and metadata
Here we are interested in the second tab – “Home page”, this is where we will register the Title, the correct Description, and Keywords for our entire site.
These are very important parameters, it is advisable to take some medium-frequency request (MF) as the Title, since the “face” (home page) of the site is the easiest to promote, so it is worth doing it for any more “traffic” requests.
Content types
Now let’s move on to the post types, here we leave only %% title %% %% page %% everywhere and don’t check the boxes anywhere. The code “%% title %% %% page %%” displays in the Title of records and pages only the Title itself without any additions, such as the name of your site. Thus, we remove %% sep %% and %% Sitename %%.%% sep %% is a separator between the Title and URL of your site.%% Sitename %% – the actual name of your site.
It does this so that the keywords that you prescribe in Title are not diluted with unnecessary phrases like your site URL, thereby losing their weight for search engines.
An example of what the post title would look like in the first and second cases.
Without %% sep %% and %% sitename %%
WordPress SEO by Yoast – plugin setup 2020
With %% sep %% and %% sitename %%
WordPress SEO by Yoast – plugin setup 2020 – websitename.com,
Where the hyphen after 2020 is sep, and “website.com” is the name of the site. Agree, in this case, the title looks very cumbersome, it is stuffed with unnecessary information and greatly reduces the wow effect of the SEO effect of such a Title.
Taxonomies
In this tab, you need to leave only %% term_title %% %% page %% and put two checkboxes in front of Labels and one first checkbox in front of Format.
This is done to prevent duplicate entries with tags from appearing in search results. If you use tags on your site, then you cannot close them from indexing, however, I personally do not use them on any site and do not recommend them to you.
Archives
Check the boxes in the Archives.
Other
In general, only the last tab remains – the Other. Despite its unobtrusive name, you just need to put two checkmarks here:
- Noindex for subpages and archives – with this checkbox we close the pagination page from indexing. In principle, we did this when we made the perfect robots.txt, but some still tick the box here.
- Use keywords in meta? – unequivocal YES, although there is a disclaimer from the developers of the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin that they do not see the point in using keywords, I still recommend prescribing it. There is no need to shove dozens of keywords, 3-5 keywords are enough. Moreover, it is necessary to write them with a small letter and separate them by commas. Sometimes some SEOs prescribe keys in Keywords, simply listing them and not separating them with commas, there is no exact answer here. The science of SEO is not accurate, everything is learned through experimentation, i.e. in a heuristic way.
Continuing to customize the best SEO plugin 2020
XML Sitemap in WordPress SEO by Yoast
So, skip the Social Networking section and go straight to the XML sitemap. Here you just need to put a tick in a single place after which the sitemap will be located at site.com/sitemap_index.xml.
That’s it, you don’t have to go anywhere further on the bookmarks.
Advanced
Now let’s move on to the Advanced item, here two tabs are important for us:
- Breadcrumbs”.
- Permalinks in SEO by Yoast.
“Breadcrumbs” in SEO by Yoast
We tick the box for “breadcrumbs” and do everything according to the instructions. Also, pay special attention to where red arrows are pointed. If you do not select “Categories” and do not paste the suggested code in the right place, then the “breadcrumbs” will not appear.
There is one caveat, you can even say an error in SEO by Yoast when putting down “bread crumbs” appears on the way, the so-called “last crumb”, which can be got rid of with this script:
function adjust_single_breadcrumb ($ link_output) {if (strpos ($ link_output, ‘breadcrumb_last’)! == false) {$ link_output = ”; } return $ link_output; } add_filter (‘wpseo_breadcrumb_single_link’, ‘adjust_single_breadcrumb’);
It is written at the very top of the functions.php file after <? Php.
The problem with the “last bread crumb” is that it completely duplicates the title of the article, which does not look very good in terms of SEO.
Permalinks
Now go to the “Permalinks” tab, which is the last one when setting up WordPress SEO by Yoast.
By the way, it is the removal of? Replytocom that allows you to get rid of the notorious “snot” in the SERP, due to which Google often has an unrealistic number of pages, while everything is in order in Yandex. By checking the box and removing the? Replytocom variables, the number of pages in Google and Yandex should become approximately the same.
P.S.
In addition, after activating the SEO by Yoast plugin for WordPress, under each post you will have a block in which you must register meta tags for the successful promotion of the article on the Internet.
If all the meta tags are spelled out correctly, and the “Focus Keyword” field contains the word or phrase by which you want to promote the article, then the light indicated by the red arrow will turn green, this is the indicator you should have in every article!
Summary
So, hopefully, it is clear now how to set up SEO by Yoast WordPress and you have no questions left, including those concerning the importance of this plugin. As you understand, it is really incredibly important, without this plugin it will be difficult for you to promote your site on WordPress.
Melisa Marzett works for paper editing service academic essay editing as an essay editor and the author of articles for many years. Despite her young age, she has come through a lot in life, which made it to where she has a lot to say. She enjoys expressing herself through writing and happy to have a grateful audience throughout the world.