WordPress is popular among all blogging platforms by hosting millions of blogs. Each WordPress blogger wants to implement seo on their blog for good rank and to drive more traffic. If you are an seo expert you can implement seo on your blog. But for beginners it takes months to manually implement seo on your blog. But don’t worry you can implement seo easily by using wordpress plugins. Especially WordPress SEO by Yoast is popular among all seo plugins in WordPress with half million active users. In this post we will explain how to configure WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Setup

WordPress SEO by Yoast has many options which helps in completely optimizing your WordPress blog. But understanding and implementing every option is difficult task to do. To make it easy we will discuss only important options which optimizes 90% of your WordPress blog seo. After installing WorPpress SEO by Yoast plugin you can see SEO option on your WordPress Dashboard left sidebar. We will discuss Titles & Metas and XML Sitemaps options.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Categories and Tags

Using WordPress SEO by Yoast you can set category and Tag’s title & description which you can index in search engines. From your WordPress dashboard go to Categories.

Click on Edit of any category.

Now enter category Name, Slug, Description and select Parent to None if it’s main category or if it’s sub category select it’s parent category.

Next you have to set Yoast Settings for the Category. Enter SEO Title like Category Name followed by blog name, SEO Description, select Noindex this category to Always Index and select Include in Sitemap to Always Include. Finally Update it.

Similarly update all the categories and follow the same procedure for Tags also.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Titles & Metas

Titles and Metas are very important part of seo where search engines mostly concentrates. Well let me explain you how? For example if you search difference between blogger and WordPress in google following result will appear. If you closely observe the result, search keywords are in the post title, meta description and in url of the post which are highlighted as bold letters by google as shown in below pic.

All together it is called snippet. Thus Titles & Metas are important and make sure keywords present in Title and Meta description. Now we will see how to configure Titles & Metas in WordrPess SEO by Yoast. Click on Titles & Metas under SEO plugin. We dont need to change anything under General tab.

Home

In Home tab keep Title template value as it is and enter your website or blog description in Meta description template as shown in below pic

Fill all the remaining tabs as shown in below pics and leave remaining fields unchecked or empty.

Post Types

Taxonomies

Before doing changes in this tab make sure you enter meta description to each and every Category and Tag in your blog. To do it on your WordPress dashboard click on Categories or Tags, edit individual Category or Tag and enter meta description.

In Other tab no changes required, keep the default values as it is. When you install WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin from then you will see a dialog box under your post editor as shown in below pic. This dialog helps in giving post title, meta description and focus keyword for individual posts. This dialog box works in coordination with Titles & Metas settings.

1. Enter Focus Keyword.
2. Enter post title followed your brand (Website or Blog name).
3. Enter Meta description for the post.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – XML Sitemaps

Till now we implemented SEO on your website or blog post, one part is done. After implementing seo on blog we need to submit our blog or website to search engines to index in their directories. Search engines love XML Sitemaps and crawls your website or blog faster. Usually we have to create XML sitemap and submit to search engines. But WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin automatically creates XML sitemap whenever you publish a new post and pings search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Just enable the XML Sitemaps in WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, no need to change any options. To know how to submit your website or blog to search engines read this post. To optimize your WordPress blog post url read this post.

If this post helped in improving your WordPress blog seo using WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin please leave us a comment.