Search Engine Optimization is a must-do process for every business website to reach the zenith of profit and success. If your site is a WordPress site, you can find many WordPress SEO plugins for your website. But every plugin won’t be able to provide the best SEO result. As a user of “WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast v3.0.7”, I must recommend you to try this best SEO Plugin I have used ever called “Yoast”. It will make your site visible to Google which is a dream for all website nowadays. Let’s start exploring “WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast” step-by-step.

Step:1 Installation of WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

Login to your website WordPress Dashboard.
Click “Plugins”
Click “Add new”
Search for “WordPress SEO” in the search field
In search result find out the plugin and install. After confirming the activation of this plugin by clicking activate to activate it.

Step:2 Configuration of WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

A. Configure General Settings

i. From the Dashboard Menu of WordPress; You will discover a menu named “Y SEO” at the left-bottom side of the menu list. Click on it and then click “General” (In this general settings windows you can have a tour about the plugin, latest changes in this plugin and you can can you can restore to the default settings of it).

ii) “Company info” Tab: The area requires your Website information and the owner info on the site. If the owner of the site is a Company, you can add the company logo here.

N.B: If you do not provide any name of your site here, it will show your site title as your site name.

iii. Webmaster Tools Tab: In this section, You can verify different Webmaster Tools to observe the insights with some relevant data regarding your website according to the specific search engine.

iv. Security Tab: You can disable advanced options for SEO meta box to your authors or editors in this area. If you disable the option, it will ensure better security.

v. OnPage.org Tab: If you enable, it will confirm the indexability checking.

B. Configure “Title & Metas”

i. General

In this area, you can select the separator for Post Title and Site Title. You also can leave it unchecked, so Yoast will use separator by automatic selection.

ii. Homepage

In this section, you will provide Title and Meta Description for the Homepage of your site.

iii. Post Types

Yoast SEO Plugin inserts extra SEO meta fields in post editing. It is better to provide SEO optimized meta title and meta description manually to each and every post. If you do not put it manually, this plugin will insert title and description will automatically add to posts, pages, and media from your article/ content.

iv. Taxonomies

In the Taxonomies section, Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin allows you to add titles and description to Categories, Tags and Format. You can control Meta Robots from this section.

v. Archives

In this Archives section allows you to use title and description for Author Archives, Date Archives and Special Pages also for 404 pages. But you are suggested to disable the Author Archives you only the single author for your site.

vi. Other

In this section provides the opportunity to disable grabbing descriptions from Dmoz or Yahoo Directories for pages. If you are confused, you can just leave these options unchecked.

C. Configure “Social”

i. Accounts

“Accounts” is the first section in this Social area. This area contains all information about your site’s social profiles for Google (Search engines). Use of this section is just to add URLs for all your social profile except Twitter. For twitter just use the username of twitter profile.

ii. Facebook

Add open graph meta data: If you check this option, it will allow WordPress SEO adding Facebook open graph meta data in your own website’s <head> section. It helps Facebook to grab its exact thumbnail and information of page when a post from.

iii. Twitter

In this section, you may add Twitter cards in the head section of your website. My suggestion to use Summary (with bigger image).

iv. Pinterest

In this section, you can connect your site with your Pinterest Account. As Facebook uses the Open Graph metadata is using Facebook and Pinterest as well. Now, just add your site to your Pinterest account and verify it, after that copy the verification code provided by Pinterest. Now paste the code in the “Pinterest verification” field and verify it.

D. Configure “XML Sitemaps”

To get indexed by the search engine and to be notified about site content XML Sitemap is just most important.

i. General

Firstly you have to enable XLM sitemap functionality to check the box for the option.

ii. User Sitemap

Now Click on “User Sitemap” tab and Put Tick in the Check Box of “Disable author/user sitemap”. Click Save Changes.

iii. Post types

In this section, you can exclude post or page from sitemaps by checking the Posts or pages checkbox. Yoast WordPress SEO keeps disabled the Media by default.

Same instructions for Taxonomies Tab. Taxonomy you are intended not to be included into Sitemaps, just exclude it here.

iv. Excluded Posts

If you want that few of your post will remain excluded, you can do it just entering the Post ID in the “Posts to exclude” field. Now click on Save Changes to save the settings.

E. Configure “Advanced”

i. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the awesome feature for internal linking. It indicates a clear track to the page you are on. It appears in the search results and provides extra benefits in the search.

To take the advantage just enable the “Enable Breadcrumbs” option by checking its checkbox.

Keep the other settings as default. Because generally, these default settings work for maximum websites.

ii. Permalinks

Change URLs

By “Strip Category Base” option; it generates a category based on each URL as /category/ by WordPress. If you want to strip any specific part of the category URLs, just put a tick mark in the checkbox for “Strip the category base URL” under “Change URLs” option.

“Redirect attachment URL” – This function works to insist trailing slash for all of the category and all tags URLs. That means when a user searches your image which attached to your post, it will redirect to the exact post, not to the attachment page.

Clean up permalinks

“Remove stop words from slugs” – This function uses for removing stop words from Permalinks which are overlooked by Search Engines.

“Remove the ?replytocom variables”– If you check this option, it will remove the ?replytocom variable from the links of Comment reply. When your site owns huge comments, it helps you to accelerate the efficiency of search spiders to crawl your site.

“Trailing Slash” – If someone wants to use .html at the end of his/her posts, then he/ she should select this function.

“Ugly URL Redirection” – This option not important for many purposes. You may leave it or select it to clean permalinks.

Clean up the <head>

Select all options here to keep <head> clean.

iii. RSS

This RSS function enables the opportunity to add content to the starting or ending of your articles when it transferred through RSS. It confirms that you are the original source of the content when it forgot by the content scrapers. There is few available variable to use as content. But default variable is enough to perfect.

F. Configure “Tools”

Get the detail of Yoast SEO Tools below:

Bulk Editor – When you need to edit all of your content together, you can use this bulk editor. It allows you to edit your content very quickly.

File Editor – This tool allows you to edit necessary files from hosting i.e. robots.txt or .htaccess in your WordPress dashboard (if your files were allowed to rewrite). But you have to be careful in this issue. Any mistakes can occur serious problem like site can be disabled for search engines.

Import/ Export – By using this tool you can import or export settings from another SEO plugin used on another site. Just get a backup of the current settings and then use the tool.

G. Configure “Extensions”

In this section, Yoast offers a few premium services for your WordPress SEO. Using these features you can get more opportunities to drive SEO for your website and it seems your investment will speak.

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