Want people to actually visit your website? You’ll need to make your website search engine friendly. This whole process is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. In this article I’ll show you how to use Yoast SEO.
How do I find the Yoast SEO plugin?
With over 5 million active installations and 25,000+ five star reviews, Yoast is widely regarded as the best SEO plugin for WordPress. Install it from the WordPress Plugin Directory as usual. Before you configure this plugin please make sure you’ve read the important accompanying information on this page. Here’s what to look for:
What does Yoast do?
Yoast is a SEO plugin. It basically helps to make your website more search engine friendly. In other words your website is likely to get a higher ranking on the likes of Google if you use a plugin such as Yoast.
For me it performs three core functions:
- It automatically generates a search engine readable sitemap
- It gives you tips to improve SEO performance for each Post and Page
- It lets you modify what your site looks like on Google
How do I configure Yoast SEO?
Yoast has a very helpful configuration wizard to guide you through the set-up process. It’s a good idea to run through this every now and then to make sure everything is as it should be. Most of the options are fairly self explanatory:
If your site is still under construction it’s a good idea to discourage search engines from visiting it. Don’t forget to switch this over to Option A once your site is done. You can do that by running through the configuration wizard again:
Unless you have multiple people editing your website then it’s a good idea to set Multiple Authors to ‘No’. This avoids any problems with duplicated content:
How do you use Yoast SEO?
Yoast is very intuitive to use. Within any Post or Page scroll down to the Yoast SEO section and add a Focus keyphrase. Keep it brief and think about the most likely thing people will search for to bring up your page:
Then scroll down to the Analysis results and you’ll see Yoast will give you a whole list of jobs to improve your search engine ranking:
Yoast also has a very helpful Readability Analysis function. This is a huge help to make your web page easier to read. It uses some very clever technology to check how readable your page is.
If you spot any errors in this article please get in touch. If you’ve got any questions you can post them below by becoming a member. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube and please join my mailing list.
Last Updated on 24 November 2020 by Andy Mac
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