By now you’re aware of the sheer awesomeness of the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. With the release of 1.2.5, there are some differences from previous versions…and this guide will help you understand how to take full advantage of the plugin’s capabilities. We’re excited to help you fully unleash the power of the best WordPress SEO plugin on the planet. Yep, it’s that good. Let’s get started.
How to Set Up The Yoast WordPress SEO v1.2.5 Plugin
Dashboard
This is first page to start with after installing the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Unless you have very knowledgeable editors on the topic of search engine optimization, you should keep the “Disable the Advanced…” check box checked. Why? This will allow editors to be able to redirect posts, set them to “noindex,” etc. Very dangerous stuff for an uninformed editorial experimentalist.
The other thing to consider on this page is setting your site up in Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Alexa. There is incredible data there to help you further optimize your website. Set it up. Copy and paste your verification codes and ID’s here as show below.
Titles & Meta
1. General
Click every check box unless the “Use meta keywords tag” section if you don’t want you’re targeted keywords to appear in the source code. Search engines don’t use them, but they help you keep track of the keywords you are targeting per page. Some SEO professionals prefer to hide such information from their competitors, although we tend to think that’s really not worth fretting over. It can be a waste of time if you don’t feel you need to keep track of your keywords, however.
We like to use “Force Rewrite Titles” Since the Home page acts funny some times. Noindexing subpages of archives will help ensure that the deeper paginated pages of your main blog page, category and other archive pages aren’t index (which will create duplicate meta tags, annoy the heck out of you in Webmaster Tools, and put you in danger of Google Panda penalties). The “noodp” and “noydir” settings prevent DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions from being used for your site in SERPs (might as well ensure that your customized descriptions are used instead). Oh, and just click every check box under the “Clean up the <head>” section at bottom. WordPress is adding more bloat to the <head> section these days, and we want to make the search bots happy 
2. Home
This section is for your homepage. Fill out Title Template as instructed below, entering a short yet compelling and keyword-rich phrase that summarizes your home page + add the %%sitename%% shortcode to automatically populate your website’s name. We like to use the | symbol to separate the two sections. Be sure to keep the entire meta title under 70 characters,, otherwise it will get cut off in the Google search results.
Fill out the Meta Description Template section with a keyword-rich, compelling sales pitch for your homepage. Limit it to 140-150 characters, otherwise it too will be cut off in the Google search results. You can use the Author highlighting section to aid in connecting your blog with your Google+ profile, which can result in your pretty little face showing up next to your blog posts in Google’s search results.
3. Post Types
This section is pretty easy. You can mostly keep everything the same, but simply check the check boxes to “noindex” and “Hide WordPress SEO” on media pages (i.e. – image attachment pages) which really just create duplicate content bloat for your website…which can lead to Google Panda penalties. You don’t want search engines indexing these pages. The default meta title settings for Posts & Pages are good since they will put your title first, then page number (if it’s paginated), and then your site name at the end with the | symbol just before it. Keeping it classy…San Diego.
*Note: If you are using the shortcode to paginate a post, the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will not add the page # into your meta title if you have customized the meta title. So, leave it blank for paginated Posts and the Post title will simply be used as the meta title. -updated 4/16/2013
4. Taxonomies
Here’s where we need to roll up our sleeves. Your Category pages are important, but they are duplicate content…so they are no different than Tag pages in all reality. However, you link to these pages from your navigation menus (giving them page rank), so give them well-optimized, unique content. Write 100+ word unique descriptions for each of your category pages (enter via Posts > Categories in WordPress). Use keywords and customize the meta data for your category pages.
Set “Post Tags” and “Format” to “noindex,” and hide the WordPress SEO Meta Box on these pages (you don’t need it), since you don’t want search engines to index these. They are just more duplicate content bloat that can get you into trouble in a post-Panda world.
Tip: Remove “Archives” from meta title template for Categories & Tags. It just makes you look outdated.
5. Other
If you’re running a one-author blog or website, then just set both “Author Archives” and “Date Archives” to be “noindex,follow” and disable these features. They are just going to get you into more duplicate content trouble with search engines and aren’t really necessary. Also, isn’t it nice to see that search result pages and 404 “not found” error pages are also set to “noindex” for you? Thanks Joost de Valk!
Social (OpenGraph)
This section allows you to add Facebook & Twitter OpenGraph Meta Data to your site…which helps protect your social media branding! Yaya! No longer will Facebook thumbnails, incorrect titles or descriptions show while sharing your posts on Facebook & Twitter. So, add yourself as a Facebook Admin, add your logo URL, site description, default image URL, click the check box to add your Twitter meta card data and add your Twitter username. This also helps search engines associate your site with your social media accounts…and remember, social signals are HUGE these days.
XML Sitemaps
While we tend to like the Google XML Sitemaps plugin a little better (more control), it’s certainly nice to use less plugins. And, this sitemap functionality at least has the essentials (ability to exclude parts of your website that can be seen as duplicate content). When it comes down to it, you really only want to be asking Google to index your home page, posts, pages, and category pages (which you wrote unique descriptions for…right?). So, check every check box except for Posts, Pages, and Categories. Then, click the “XML Sitemap” button, copy the URL and submit it in Webmaster Tools for your site. Help Google (and Bing) help you.
Permalinks
Stop right there. This section is no about cute search engine friendly URLs for your WordPress site. Instead, this section tells search engines how to handle your permalinks. Simply check every check box except for two: “Redirect attachment URLs” (since we’ve already set them to noindex) and “Prevent cleaning out Google Site Search URLs” (since you are probably using WordPress’s built in search functionality). However, if you don’t like “image attachment” pages…you can click the check box to redirect them back to the parent page that they are hosted on. That’s fine.
Tip #1: If you are using the “WP No Category Base” plugin to remove /category/ from Category page URLs, then you’ll want to deactivate that plugin. It’s no longer needed!
Tip #2: If you are doing eCommerce on a WordPress site (shame on you, it’s not secure!), then you might want to clarify that the “http” version of your canonical URLs should be used since your site will most likely have both http and https versions of your URLs.
Caution: We have noticed problems with the “Strip the /category/ base” feature on sites with the WP-Clear theme. Each day, it seems the setting breaks and this setting must be toggled (checked or unchecked) in order for it to work again. It could end up working even when set to the “off” position. Currently under investigation.
Internal Links (Breadcrumbs)
This section is for navigational breadcrumbs, which are good for SEO since they help ensure that you show both users (and search engines) links to your other pages within each section. This section takes a little more knowledge, although you can do it. We recommend reading this page on the Yoast website for more information. Joost already covered it nicely.
RSS
This section is simply awesome. Protect yourself from evil scraper sites by ensuring that you have links to the original posts/pages on your site (plus a link to your home page) from within your RSS feed. Help fight the good fight against duplicate content and keep this page as is.
Import & Export
If you’re already using the All-in-One SEO Pack or HeadSpace2 plugins, this section will help you quickly and easily migrate to WordPress SEO by Yoast. Simply check the check boxes to import from either plugin, and also the check box to delete the old data, click Import and then go deactivate the older plugin. Bam!
Tip: If you’re a Platinum SEO Pack user, you’ll need to use the SEO Data Transporter plugin, and then follow these instructions.
Well, that’s it! Hopefully this helps you get started with using this top notch WordPress SEO plugin. If you have any tips of your own, leave ‘em in the comments.
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{ 67 comments… read them below or add one }
Simple question needs simple answer.
Wordpress profile page has added field at the bottom for SEO settings.
field #1. Title to use for Author page
What is the Author page? Is there a visible profile page on my blog?
Is this title supposed to describe my profile page?
field #2. Meta description to use for Author page.
Again, am I describing the profile page?
Should this be a readable sentence more descriptive than the Title?
field #3. Meta keywords to use for Author page.
keywords for my profile? can this be correct.
I have googled and youtubed for hours, can’t find a thing. Please help. Thanks.
Hi Joane, the new meta data settings in profile page are to help you optimize your “Author” pages should you choose to allow them to be indexed by Google in the Yoast Wordpress SEO settings. Here is an example of my author page, although I am not using Yoast on this site.
Thanks Dan,
Exactly what I was looking for. Step by step, clear and concise. Great help.
Glad it helped, Sam!
Hi,
I am having some trouble with the home page. My home page looks like this:
Homepage & Front page
You can determine the title and description for the front page by editing the front page itself »
You can determine the title and description for the blog page by editing the blog page itself »
Author metadata
Author highlighting:Don’t showadmin
Choose the user that should be used for the rel=”author” on the blog homepage. Make sure the user has filled out his/her Google+ profile link on their profile page.
Google Publisher Page:
If you have a Google+ page for your business, add that URL here and link it on your Google+ page’s about page.
I am not real sure what to do here because I can’t find anywhere to add keywords. Can you help please.
Nadene
Click on the link in this sentence: You can determine the title and description for the front page by editing the front page itself »
That will allow you to add keywords to the meta data for your home page.
Hello Dan,
This plugin is really nice, and you did good job on Explaining How to Setup it Right.
In 3. Post Types, if i setup That No Follow/index, on Media pages, it will Not Follow/Index all pages where i have Media, or just Those Media Files? is not that 1 more way to we be found?
Just that is little confusing…
Im Beginner in This so i hope you understand…
Thanks for all and keep up the Great Work.
It will set all image attachment pages, which are really unnecessary pages that Wordpress builds on your site with the image on it (“attachment” is in the URL), to “noindex,follow” so that Google’s index of your site doesn’t get cluttered with worthless pages that can drive your site quality/engagement down and get you dinged by Panda updates.
Hi Dan
Thanks for your easy to follow instructions. I’m just having one issue with the XML sitemap generator. /category-sitemap.xml is giving me the following error in google webmaster tools: “Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.”
when you actually click on the /category-sitemap.xml link it takes you to a error page.
Any suggestions what can fix this?
Hi Fiona, I personally don’t use the sitemap functionality of the Yoast plugin since I like how the Google XML Sitemaps plugin gives me more control. So, you could try that instead. Regarding the Yoast category sitemap XML page…I know it’s working fine on his site: http://yoast.com/category-sitemap.xml.
Extremely helpful! After struggle with titles and meta date your post accomplished everything I needed.
Seo by Yoast is one of the best seo plugin for Wordpress, I just started using it like a month ago and can see a real good change in my traffic and ranking in SERP. In every post it help to get a good titles, Meta description according to the keyword that we suggest, it also works on rich snippet and all that. Thanks for the full detail.
I agree, Prince. For Wordpress sites that use a theme without SEO features, Yoast is the way to go.
Hi Dan! Really appreciate the tutorial. Quick question. Is it worth it to add something in the “Anchor text for the Homepage” area under Breadcrumbs to help SEO. If so, what would you suggest?
Most would just put “Home,” But if your website is “Widget Depot,” and “widgets” is your keyword, then you could consider making “Widget Depot” (your business name) the anchor text for a little extra optimization…although not going to make or break the optimization of your site.
I am confused about noindexing media. Pictures are an important part of my site. I want them to show up in google searches so should I still noindex them?
It sets the image attachment page (a page with the image and no other content) to “noindex,follow,” …not the actual image file.
Thanks for the quick response. I had made a huge mistake by masking instead of using a 301 redirect and am now trying to put back the pieces. I am trying to make sure it all works correctly. Your help is appreciated.
Ah…so if you masked instead of 301 redirect, then you had two completely duplicate sites with different URLs. You probably got hit with a Google Panda penalty?
Dan, can I get an opinion on whether I should noindex and/or nofollow a page. The page list all of the companies we have done product reviews for. I using a tag plugin for that page. Part of me thinks it is good SEO but I am worried it is duplicate or weak content. The page will eventually have several hundred links.
Hard to say without seeing the page…but if you add a line or two of unique content under each company name/link, and watch the engagement stats in Google Analytics to ensure it doesn’t have a super high bounce rate/low Time on Site…then it should be okay to keep it indexed. Just ask yourself, “What is the value to someone who finds this page?” Focus on making it valuable.
This is the pagehttp://threeguysgolfblog.com/product-reviews-by-company/
I think it has great relevance to readers but I don’t want to be dinged by google for a page of links and no real content.
Great post Dan. I’m a huge fan of Yoast plugin and I think anyone running a website on wordpress and not using this plugin is missing out greatly. The twitter cards bit is quite cool and I suggest website owners should use it by applying here https://dev.twitter.com/form/participate-twitter-cards.
When I activate this plugin, the lightboxes (like for inserting an image, link, etc) stop working. Why does this happen and what should I do?
That is odd. Never heard of that. I would suggest deactivating, deleting and seeing if the lightboxes fix…if so, then try re-installing the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin.
When I deactivate, even without deleting/uninstalling, the lightboxes work. I have read somewhere that this plugin can have issues when used in combination with other plugins, so i tried turning everything off but Wordpress SEO..no luck. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling and it still doesn’t work.
I just installed latest yoast seo plug-in Version and I can’t find the robots.txt editor in the File menu. I only have the .htaccess file editor.
My robot.txt only showing
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
When i check http://www.mywebsite.com/robot.txt
What to do????plz help me
I suspect that your robots.txt file is not set to CHMOD 777 or similar (which makes it write-able) on your server. Email your hosting company’s support team to have them address for you if you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself.
Soooooo helpful. This walked me through everything I needed painlessly. Thank you!
Just wanted to say that this is a great write up. This plug-in can be very intimidating at first, but if people go through this step by step, it is well worth the effort.
Thanks!
Ha ha, ok, you can delete these posts- I figured it out. The SEO Data Transport plugin does the hard work for me. I do think it should be in big red words though, would have saved me an hour.
Regardless of all that, great article, thanks for posting!
Glad you got it figured out! Yeah, SEO Data Transporter is a really handy plugin to complete the puzzle for some people’s migrations to the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin.
Nice write up, thanks. Do you a similar guide to setting up the SEO on each page?
Thanks
Barry
I have not yet, but I should! That’s where tall the magic happens with the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast
Thank you so much, this was very useful!
Only Facebook OpenGraph won’t let me add an admin and I have no clue why, could it be because I installed the Facebook plugin?
At least everything else is all set up, which is a huge step forward!
Not sure about OpenGraph but glad Yoast is set up now!
Hello Dan Kern,
I read your post about “The Noob’s Guide to WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast”. It is very well written and in very easy language to understand. Your information about redirection of Attachment url to parent post url is perfect.
I also follow this step and it works well. But my issue is little bit different.
My permalink structure was /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ before 21st January, 2013. I redirected Attachment url to parent post url through Yoast’s seo plugin and it works.
But after 21st January, 2013, I change my permalink structure. /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/
and I redirect my old permalink structure to new permalink structure. (with Simple 301 Redirects plugin)
I uncheck Attachment url to parent post url in Yoast’s seo plugin and then once again check the box of Attachment url to parent post url. So that refresh Yoast’s seo plugin and it works normally. But it works only with new permalink structure (/%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/), not working with the old permalink structure(/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/). My lots of traffic from Images. And therefore it is result in so many 404 errors. (Not Found)
Attachment url to parent post url is working only for those post which I published after 21st January, 2013. Before this date I published almost 594 post and for all those post, Attachment url to parent post url doesn’t work. One solution is there with Simple 301 Redirects and it is that I have to redirect my each image of those 594 posts to their parent post url. You can understand, I have to redirect almost 3000 + images one by one.
I have trying lot to find out solution since last 20 days. But I have no solution. So kindly request you, Please suggest me how to get rid of this issue. I hope, I will get positive response.
Ashish Patel
I was going to suggest trying using wildcards (*) to at least replace /month/ in the image URLs to help consolidate the redirects, but the Simple 301 Redirect Tool won’t help. Hmm…I’m not sure honestly…this is a new one.
Thanks, it was very useful. Hope it works.
Great post…..i recently reset my yoast settings and forgot to stop archiving tag and author pages and google has nailed our site for serious duplicate content. We had it enabled when we first installed yoast months ago but let this be a lesson to all. duplicate content penalties are a nightmare!
I’ve been there. It sucks.
Hi Dan,
I recently moved from All in One SEO to WordPress SEO and have seen immediate dividends.
But, now my meta descriptions cut off mid sentence when I use my site’s share button on social media. Before it would display the full content of posts (my posts are short but sometimes a bit longer than 156). Have you seen this before? Any ideas how to get it back to posting the full content without manually changing the meta description on each post? Or even making it so that when a post gets cut off there is an ellipsis and it doesn’t look so abrupt.
My site is http://www.profootballhotreads.com and here would be a sample post getting cut off by the said social media:
http://www.profootballhotreads.com/bill-barnwell-super-bowl-prop-bets/
Note: I also experienced a double title issue but it was resolved when I deactivated an opengraph plug in that was conflicting.
I tried posting on the Word Press Forum but didn’t get any help.
Hmm…I don’t see cut off descriptions on the link example you gave, but I’ve not heard of that either.
If you go to the link and hit either the facebook or G+ tag in a post, the meta is cut off when it posts to those sites.
Fantastic. Thanks Dan!
Thank you so much! I use this plug-in on all my sites but im always just a little confused about the best way to set it up. I followed your lead!! THX again!
Happy to help keep it sunny in your world, Summer
Hi Kern! Great guide, thanks a lot for this work.
Have you had any issues with trying to save the SEO meta data on Media Attachments? I can update/save SEO meta data just fine on posts/pages, but my data doesn’t get saved when doing SEO on media attachments (pdf files, etc.).
Any clue?
I haven’t, sorry. I always just set the Media Attachment pages to “noindex” since they can be considered thin content by the Google Panda algorithm…thus, I’ve never had a reason to customize the meta data.
Alright, thanks for the reply regardless.
Do you happen to know of any ways to make our PDF documents SEO-friendly, though?
Thanks Dan. Finally someone explained the yoast plugin correctly with photos.
Hey Dan, this is a great summary of the yoast plugin, thanks for the tips. Any rcommendations on the .htaccess file editing? I’ll be using this to set my custom 404 error page, would be interested to hear how you use it.
Hey Christian, I don’t use this area of Yoast’s Wordpress SEO plugin much besides to update the robots.txt file, however one could add 301 Redirect Rules to the .htaccess if desired.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for such a great article! I went thru all my settings (yet again) and tweaked a few. I have a store, use WooCommerce, so that adds a lot more options on taxonomies and post types. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks agin for how freely you give of your time with this site. Greatly appreciated.
Kathy
Can you post some of the additional taxonomy types that the Yoast plugin is pulling in? If they are pages of actual unique content (like a product page with a unique product description, or a category page with unique intro text that you’ve written), then you want to allow them to be indexed by Google. Otherwise, the page type is probably duplicate content (i.e. – tag pages) or thin content (i.e. – media attachment pages) and could get you penalized by Google Panda updates.
Thank you so much! That was incredibly helpful. Quite a few people I know have recommended this plug-in to me but I was feeling a little like a rabbit caught in headlights with the different options! This was just what I needed to sort it out.
Wonderful, Leah…so happy to be of help with this guide. The Yoast plugin is really powerful and helps us focus on creating great (linkworthy) content if set up correctly.
Dan,
You are a gentleman and a star guy.
Helped me a lot with my site
Cheers mate!
Happy to help with this guide! The Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin really is the best Wordpress SEO plugin on the market.
Great and precise step by step tutorial but is it wise to use Yoast Sitemap instead of Google XML sitemap??
The Yoast Sitemap is fine to use if you don’t need to block specific pages from the sitemap.
Hi Dan – Question for you:
Currently, in Yoast, I have” title template” for tag + categ are populated with (%%term_title%% Archives %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%), while “meta description template” is (%%category_description%%) and (%%tag_description%%) respectively. I should point out that it’s a new blog with no real content just yet and my goal is to have elements set up correctly for smooth sailing. That said, as categories and tags get added, do I need to be filling out their descriptions so that yoast’s “description templates” pull that info? What is the benefit of naming categories? Lastly, if I don’t name and with my current set up, what would a search result end up looking like (what will meta be?)
Thanks in advance!
R
I would suggest writing custom meta descriptions for each of your categories. Why? B/c you only have a max of around 150 characters to use…and most on-page descriptions for categories are going to be longer than that. It’s essentially a single sentence. You want 3-5 sentences (at least) for your on-page category descriptions. Regarding naming categories, just name them with the topic that they discuss. For example, if you have a blog category about Technical SEO, then name it “Technical SEO.”
Dan,
It’s really kind when people who have knowledge of a subject are willing to help those of us who are struggling along find our way. This guide is of huge help.
In regard to categories and duplicate content, so I am clear, it helps to write unique, descriptions for each category? And when we do write these descriptions, should we put the information under the Yoast SEO Description, in the Wordpress description box, or in both?
Really, I do appreciate the help you’ve given us here! Maybe a post on canonical links someday? Makes my head spin!
Thanks again,
JB
Happy to help, Josh. The Wordpess Description field is for the text that appears on-page to the user. That is a critical piece. I suggest writing 100+ words of unique, compelling text that uses your keywords without sounding spammy. Even boldface your primary keyword. The Yoast SEO Description is the “meta description,” which is what Google shows in its SERPs (as you may know already). Also important to fill out. Keep it under 150 characters, use your keywords and make it compelling. It is essentially the sales pitch for your page.
Hi Dan,
I am having trouble setting the SEO for my home page. When i go to the SEO Titles and Metas page and select the ‘home’ tab, it doesn’t look like your illustration above. Instead it says;
Homepage & Front page
You can determine the title and description for the front page by editing the front page itself »
But when I press the link it takes me back to my wordpress dashboard and I don’t know what to do from there. Can you help please?
Hi Julie, that is strange. It should take you to the site Page that you’ve designated to be your home page in the SETTINGS > READING section of your Wordpress sites’ settings. How are your settings there?