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For those of us who are less tech savvy, WordPress plugins make it immensely easier to optimise our website without much technical know-how.
If your goal is to show up higher in the Google search rankings, the Yoast SEO plugin is well worth installing. Yoast provides a helpful real-time guide to tweaking your posts and pages, offering suggestions for what you can do to better optimise them based on your desired SEO keyword phrase.
Here’s our quick guide to using the Yoast SEO plugin to optimise your WordPress site. Not sure which plugin to choose? Read our comparison of All in One SEO vs Yoast vs Rank Math.
Yoast SEO For Your Blog Posts
After you install the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll start to see the Yoast SEO box at the bottom of every post and page when you go to write or edit them.
Your goal is to get that little traffic light icon to turn green, which means you’ve optimised your post well for your keyword phrase. If this light is orange or red, you’ve got some work to do. Luckily Yoast makes it easy:
- First, enter the keyword you’d like this particular post or page to rank for in the ‘Focus keyphrase’ box.
- Then, take a look at the suggestions in the SEO analysis. If they’re marked in green, it means you’ve already completed them. If not, consider following the tip by making small tweaks to your post or page content. As you do, those lights will start to turn green.
- Is the main traffic light at the top of the Yoast SEO box green yet? Once it is, consider your page well optimised.
It’s very important to note that Yoast is not the be-all, end-all of SEO. You don’t have to follow it *exactly* in order to get your website to rank higher on Google. Just do what you feel comfortable with.
Yoast SEO For Your Website
The Yoast SEO plugin also comes with some sitewide settings that you can optimise and tweak if desired. To access these, hover over the Yoast SEO link on the left side of your WordPress dashboard and open its settings.
Our SEO specialists tend to focus on the title settings (called Titles & Metas in older versions of Yoast). This is where you can adjust the structure of your page and post titles, i.e. the wording that appears in search results and in your browser tab.
The Yoast default setting includes some code-like variables that usually display the page name along with your website name. You may want to change these to include a particular keyword phrase that you’re especially keen to rank for. When you do this, that keyword will appear on all post and page titles throughout your site unless you change them on the individual post or page edit screens (in the Yoast SEO box we looked at earlier).
In the screenshot above, we added a keyword phrase to the end of all page titles on a site because it was the main keyword that business wanted to rank for on Google.
Be careful not to add too much text to your post titles. Blog post names tend to be longer than page names, and if you’re also including your site name AND a keyword phrase in the post title, it’s probably going to be too long and get cut off in search results.
Three Handy Yoast Settings
- Decide which archive pages Google should see. WordPress creates archive pages for categories, tags, authors and dates. If they only repeat excerpts of your posts, they add little and can create near-duplicate pages. In Yoast’s settings you can choose not to show thin archive types (often tag and date archives) in search results.
- Set a sitewide title format. Yoast lets you set a template for every page and post title, using variables such as the page title and your site name, so titles stay consistent. Keep the template short so titles aren’t cut off in search results.
- Edit titles and descriptions in bulk. Doing an SEO tidy-up? Yoast’s bulk editor (under Tools) lists your pages and posts with their current titles and descriptions, so you can update many at once without opening each one.
