Yoast SEO: Top Results, maximal profit of SEO, custom meta descriptions, cornerstone content, title tags. There are so many overwhelming opportunities in the world of SEO – and you can easily get lost.
We suggest yo always install Yoast for your website, as it is free and an easy way to optimize your content, so your website can be found organically in the search engines.
Let’s start with the true basics
What is the WordPress Yoast SEO plugin?
Yoast is one of the most used SEO plugins for WordPress, and works support you gaining improvements on your websites ranking on search engines, by informative alerting you onw which part of your sites content and keywords you should work with.
A lot of the functionality in Yoast SEO is automated, but it will still need your own inputs, some planning and hard work to get the last 5%.
How do Yoast SEO work for you
Once installed at your WordPress site, you should clap your own shoulder. You have then gained the most valuable tool you can have for WordPress, at the moment.
Yoast can easily be installed and is the, to date, most compresensive SEO related plugin – and it’s free.
The Yoast SEO premium extensions can for sure some extra, but the most critical functionality is part of the free plugin.
Installing Yoast SEO
1) Open your WordPress Admin, in the left menu click Plugins
2) Click in the top left corner on Add new
3) Search for Yoast SEO
Click the button Install now followed by Activate.
You have now taken the best decision in your life, by implementing an cool SEO tool.
And if you think all the hard work stops now, I must admit it – it have only just begun.
Setting up Yoast SEO
To get started, now go to your left menu and fin the SEO option, and click General.
You have now reached the environment of the General settings, which we strongly tells suggest you to take some time and fill out all tabs.
Your info
The Tab Your Info is critical for telling Google further information about your website, and any alternative name you might be found under, it is part of their Knowledge Graph results – which automatically contains company logo etc.
Webmaster Tools
You have for sure plans of using Google Search Console, and if you hadn’t – you should.
The Tab Webmaster Tools is giving you the option to connect directly with Google, Alexa, Bing and Yandex. You should take the time and do so – it will benefit you in a couple of months.
Using Yoast SEO
You have now entered the stage where you can benefit of Yoast SEO and all the opportunities.
Yoast have two automated “green/yellow/red” bars notifying you where to have your SEO focus and how you should prioritize your time on becoming number one on Google.
As you are in the process of going through all pages and posts on your website for optimizations, this column will be extremely helpfull, because you can sort based on that column – making et even more easy to identify which pages needing immediately attention, and which you just need to optimize.
A few thing to watch out for
It is simple that as many green dots as possible is focus one, but keep in mind that having some yellow dots isn’t a bad thing at all. It just tells you that the page might not be 100% optimal, but it is still in an acceptable.
There are as well certain fields on the website that Yoast SEO can’t pick up – as the featured image. This leads to that you might end in a position where Yoast claims you do not have any images on the website, while the Featured Image is present.
Yoast will as well suggest you put the targeted keyword (focus keyword) as part of the title. If it doesn’t work with the actual H1 – you will be hit negatively as you have misused the words.
Our best suggestion is to always use your own best judgement. And follow the recommendations you shuold listen to, and which you shuold avoid.
You can read more about Yoast and what an XML Sitemap is here
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