Yoast SEO Plugin Configurations

Yoast SEO Plugin Configurations

Yoast is one of our standardized plugins that we install on any website that we get from a client. It is the primary tool that allows our account managers to modify just about anything search engine related. They can do this directly on the website which is a great benefit to us.

Go ahead and get the plugin installed, and let’s look into it. Once again, Muenster Milling and their website, www.muenstermilling.com, will be the example client we are using for this tutorial.

On the left hand side tool bar of WordPress, down towards the bottom, we should see a button that says “SEO” with a “Y” to the left of it. This is the Yoast SEO plugin button.

Let’s begin

While you are hovering over the SEO button , you will see the options for:

  1. General
  2. Search Appearance
  3. Search Console
  4. Social
  5. Tools
  6. Premium

This tutorial pertains to Yoast SEO 7.0 and newer. The previous versions had an advanced menu that is no longer available. The first thing that we urge account managers do inside of the SEO area of the website is to begin making logical, educated assumptions.

What is an educated assumption?

What does making an educated assumption mean? It means going into the 6 areas mentioned above (General, Search Appearance, and so on) and filling in every field to the best of your abilities. Let’s look at all six sections one by one.

General

Let’s go inside of the “General” tab. Immediately, you will see “Dashboard, Features, and Webmaster Tools”. Let’s go ahead and click “Features”. Go ahead and scroll through all of Muenster Milling’s settings and see what you can find. The first section is titled “SEO analysis”. This is the primary area that adds everything to the admin columns. Inside of posts and pages, it will tell you if you added enough content using proper keywords.

Readability analysis, Cornerstone content, and Text link counter will almost always be turned on as they are very crucial. XML sitemaps are a little bit different. When you toggle XML sitemaps “on”, you enable users the ability to go to MuensterMilling.com/sitemap.xml and view the site map.

A good XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages of a website. This roadmap guides Google to all main content on a website. Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial for SEO, as Google can retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of a site isn’t flawless.

To wrap things up, you can disregard “Ryte integration” as you will never use it. “Admin bar menu” allows shortcuts for the WordPress user.

Search Appearance

The settings you see upon clicking “Search Appearance” will be your typical settings. Title separators, content types, and media are just some of the things you can edit inside of here. For example, adding alt text dynamically and/or snippet previews are some things you can do inside of here.

The taxonomies do need to be reviewed. In the event that your blogging, the Archive section can be very useful. Breadcrumbs can be done by Yoast, but a lot of times its handled by the theme itself. Inside of the RSS section, you can modifications if you choose to do so.

Search Console

This is a lesser used tool that comes with Yoast. With it, it is possible to authenticate Google’s Search Console within the Yoast tools. 9 times out of 10 we’ll do that through Google Tag Manager (GTM), but this plugin can potentially allow you to skip all of that.

Social

This section is also not used too terribly often. But if you wanted display social profiles on your website using the Yoast system, this would be the place to do that.

Tools

This section has a love/hate relationship with the developers at Globe Runner.  There is not much to be said for account managers reading this section except that you should touch base inside of here and review what you would like to review.

Next steps

We have now covered the primary area of Yoast that will be used by account managers. For just about any single post inside of the website, you will find a Yoast SEO area inside of that post. The order the elements will appear inside of a post are:

  • A title area
  • A content area
  • Yoast SEO

Note: If you actually click on the text inside of there, it will give you the option to change or modify that text.