The Yoast SEO plugin is great WordPress plugin. For starters, we strongly recommend that you add it to WordPress after installation. Yoast is designed to help bloggers and content developers of all kinds to make their pages more visible in online search results.
However, after installing Yoast SEO, many new users will forget that some effort is required to configure the plug-in for good results.
Things you need to do with the YOAST Seo module
Set it up!
Installing Yoast SEO alone is not enough. The plug-in includes some default settings, but not all websites need these. If you need help, Yoast SEO has an installation wizard to help you configure the plugin.
Upload your webpage to the Google Search Console
To add YOAST to the Google Search Console, you’ll first need to upload your webpage, validate it, and then upload your Sitemap. If you have all of these, Google will crawl your website. The data you collect by crawling is then available in the Google Search Console, so you can be sure that Google has correctly returned the look and feel of your website.
Note: It may take a few weeks for Google to index your page based on its size. You’ll get an alert from the Search Console if any problems happen in the meantime, but sometimes you can look into it too.
Upload your webpage to Bing Webmaster Tools
There is more than just Google when it comes to search engines. Bing gained 21 percent market share in 2016. Sure, we know Google’s share is over 64 percent, but you can’t ignore Bing either because a lot of users use it as their primary search engine. Bing has its own algorithm and tools to crawl and index your website.
With Yoast Seo, you can easily configure Bing Webmaster Tools. Upload your website URL and sitemap URL. Then enter the verification key in the appropriate section of YOAST Seo Webmaster Tools (SEO – Webmaster Tools tab, WordPress admin interface). As with Google, this gives Bing the right to validate your website, and Webmaster Tools can collect information about your website’s health under Bing.
Enable Open Graph
Searching on social media is a big task. What you share on social media can generate traffic to your website. However, it doesn’t matter how you share this content. Yoast SEO includes tools that make your content even more consumable for social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.
Once you have installed Yoast SEO, enable Open Graph on your website. Not all social media plug-ins for WordPress have this feature, so Yoast SEO definitely has an advantage over others.
Fill out your social media profile
Taking a few minutes to fill out your social media profile in Yoast SEO will improve your visibility in Google search results. Why is that? Because of Google’s Knowledge Graph tool, which is a powerful system that helps you understand facts about people, places, and things and how they connect. Knowledge Graph data represents a special search query that appears in a special panel. It is also sometimes referred to as the Knowledge Card, located on the first page of the search results on the right (in desktop view). The Knowledge Card displays an image, a description, a social media profile, and more.
Google doesn’t always list your social media profile, but if you fill out your profile in YOAST SEO, you have a better chance of seeing this information on your Business Knowledge Card.
Set up your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ data
As mentioned earlier, it’s important to set up Open Graph on your website so that if someone shares your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, it will appear in the appropriate format. On some social channels, such as Facebook, this format lists the image of your page or article, the title of your article, a brief summary, the source, and the author.
The Open Graph format displays content on social media channels in a much more attractive way than throwing a link there. So if you take this opportunity, you can entice your visitors to click on and read your own content.
Set titles and metadata
YOAST SEO offers alternatives to titles and metadata that Google likes. Sure, Google decides what to use in the end, but you can try to control the title and descriptive information that Google displays even by changing the content in the YOAST SEO installation. In the general settings control panel, you can set titles and metadata for each article type (be it article, page, media file, and other article types). You can also set the system (such as categories and tags), archive, and more here.
Fill in your own title and metadata in the preview view for both articles and pages
Sometimes varying the general content is not enough. Add a special title or metadata for each article or page. This means, for example, that you can write an eye-catching title or metadata for an article or page that may encourage more visitors to click on it when you see it in search results.
Use the Yoast SEO Knowledge Base
The Yoast team invests a lot of time writing articles and making videos to help you understand the features of Yoast SEO. Each interface of the plugin has a Knowledge Base section that you can study.
Installation
You can install Yoast SEO from the WordPress plugins page or add it through this link.
