How to Configure Yoast SEO Settings in 2021

Are you using the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress but don’t know how to configure it properly or how to use it to its full potential. In this tutorial, I am going to teach you how you can easily configure Yoast SEO plugin to double your site traffic.

hire me to configure Yoast SEO on your WordPress website and optimize complete on-page SEO

WordPress SEO is easier because of plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, Rank Math, and there are countless more. If you really want to get traffic through Google searches then you must do SEO right.

Yoast SEO Tutorial for 2021

Before starting any SEO campaign, you should perform thorough keyword research. You might ask, why is that important? You might say things like I know my target audience and I know what do they search for when they look for my product or service on Google. The fact is, no one can be sure of that.

I made such mistakes in the past, when I launched a couple of my websites I didn’t perform any keyword research. I was 100% certain that I know my target audience and keywords that are coming up in my mind were definitely searched by my target audience. Oh man, I was so wrong. I had no idea what I was doing. So, despite writing tons of content on my website, I barely got any traffic. The reason was I used improper keywords that no one actually typed on Google except a dozen of people monthly.

Hence, keyword research must be the most important step in your SEO. You can use keyword research tools like semrush, Ahrefs, Googe keyword planner, and Google auto-suggest features. Or if you know of someone really capable of finding you the right keywords then hire them. It is not as easy as it sounds, there is a lot of guesswork these days in keyword research.

How to check the keywords that you chose are actually searched by people? If you want to be 100% certain then you should run a Google Ads campaign on that particular keyword and spend a few dollars to check how many impressions and clicks this keyword gets.

Now that you have finalized keywords, it is time to install and configure the Yoast SEO plugin on your website.

You have to install the Yoast SEO plugin from the WordPress plugins directory.

• Go to plugins, click Add New. Search for “Yoast SEO”. Download and install the plugin.
• Log in to your WordPress website. Click on ‘SEO’ from the WordPress menu.

General

This section includes general things that don’t fit elsewhere like (re)starting the configuration wizard.

you can configure the most important settings on your site, like define your name for Google’s site name markup, modify whether you are an organization or a person for Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Dashboard

On the Dashboard tab, you’ll find the Yoast SEO configuration wizard, which allows you to easily configure the plugin for your website. You’ll also see a heading called Problems, which shows all the issues this plugin detected that affect the SEO of your site. Lastly, you’ll see a heading called Notifications, which shows all the notifications from the Yoast SEO plugin.

Features

On the Features tab, you can disable and enable the following features within Yoast SEO for your entire site:

• SEO analysis
• Readability analysis
• Cornerstone content
• Text link counter
• Insights
• Link suggestions
• XML sitemaps
• Ryte integration

Search Appearance

This section allows you to customize the title and meta templates that are automatically applied to your content, prevent duplicate content and decide if a certain post type should appear in the search results.

The General tab of the Search Appearance settings allows you to edit the:

• Title separator: what we use to separate different parts of your SEO title from each other. For example, this could be a hyphen (-), a bullet (•), or a vertical bar (|).
• Homepage: here, you can set the SEO title and meta description for your homepage.
• Knowledge Graph & Schema.org: these settings determine what your site will look like when it shows up in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Content Types

On the Content Types tab, you can determine whether you want each of the different content types your site has to show up in the search results.

Media

On the Media tab, you can determine whether you want to redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself.

When you upload an image to WordPress, that image gets a URL that becomes available. WordPress also automatically generates an entirely new web page, containing just that image: a so-called attachment URL. These attachment URLs are quite empty and because of that, it’s better to disable them, and redirect them to the media item itself.

Taxonomies

On the Taxonomies tab, you’re allowed to determine whether you want search engines to show the different types of taxonomies (e.g. categories, tags) in the search results. You can also alter the templates of the SEO title and meta description for these taxonomies.

Archives

On the Archives tab, you can determine how different types of archives will be treated on your website. You can allow search engines to show the different types of archives (e.g. author archives, date archives) of your site in their search results.

Breadcrumbs

Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. If your theme supports Yoast breadcrumbs, the settings on the Breadcrumbs tab will be available. Here, you can determine what your breadcrumbs will look like.

Tools

Warning: This section may require advanced WordPress experience and, in rare cases, may cause problems with other functions of your site. Use with caution.

The Yoast SEO plugin offers the following tools:

• Import and Export: allows you to import settings from other SEO plugins and export your settings for re-use on another blog.
• File editor: allows you to quickly change important files for your SEO, like your robots.txt file and, if you have one, your .htcaccess file.
• Bulk editor: allows you to quickly change titles and descriptions of your posts and pages without having to go into the editor for each page.
• Optimize SEO data: allows us to fetch all of a page’s metadata in one simple database request (rather than lots of individual requests), resulting in much faster page loads.

How to Configure Yoast SEO Premium plugin? What’s the difference between yoast SEO free and premium.

There’s not much of a difference apart from few new features which are added once you buy a Yoast SEO premium package. However, you can use other plugins to achieve similar goals.

If you don’t want to spend your time configure and set up Yoast plugin all by yourself then you can hire me. I will only charge $35 to completely optimize your WordPress website using Yoast Plugin.

If you don’t want to set up Yoast SEO plugin all by yourself and want someone to do it for you the right way then please feel free to contact me.