Yoast SEO Setting 2017 to rank fist page on google search

The Yoast SEO Plugin by Joost De Valk is the most robust WordPress SEO plugin out there, but it must be setup and used properly if you want the best results for your WordPress SEO.

You can break Yoast down into 3 steps: configuring the Yoast SEO settings (while adding AMP Pages to make your mobile site load faster), researching focus keywords, and creating optimized pages with the help of green lights. I will also show you how to fix crawl errors (broken pages) and optimize your website with rich snippets and Google Search Console.

This is a COMPLETE guide to Yoast SEO. If you don’t have Yoast go to plugins → add new → search Yoast SEO → install/activate. If you already have Yoast, make sure it’s updated to the latest version since they constantly update this plugin.

1. Dashboard
2. Titles & Metas
3. Social
4. XML Sitemaps
5. Advanced
6. Tools
7. Search Console
8. Go Premium
9. AMP
10. Import The Same Yoast Settings I Use
11. Focus Keyword Research
12. Green Light Optimization
13. Anatomy Of A Perfectly Optimized Page

1. Dashboard

Dashboard

General

Features

Company Info

Webmaster Tools

Verifying Webmaster Tools

• Sign up for Google Search Console (Bing/Yandex have same process)
• Select the “HTML tag” verification process
• Copy the code and paste into the Google Search Console field
• Delete everything outside of the quotations (including the quotations)
• Save changes in Yoast
• Click “Verify” in Google Search Console
• Repeat for Bing and Yandex (Russia’s largest search engine)
• This will help you fix crawl errors (broken pages) using the Search Console tab, as well as many other optimizations you can make with Google Search Console

Noindex – means you’re choosing not to index (publish) something in search engines.

2. Titles & Metas

Force Rewrite Titles
A common issue with Yoast is duplicate sitenames in the SEO title. To see if this is happening to you, open your site and hover over the browser tab to check for duplicates (photo below). Enabling force rewrite titles can fix duplicate sitenames, but it’s not preferred according to Yoast since it can slow down your site. The preferred solution is to go to Appearance → Editor → Header.php and delete everything between <title> and </title>, then replace it with the code below. When done, make sure the duplicate is gone (by hovering over the browser tab).

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

Homepage

Post Types

Custom Variables – the templates above are only used if you DON’T write custom SEO titles + meta descriptions (which you should do for each page/post). While there are other templatesyou can use, the one from the screenshot “Page Title – Sitename” is generally the best. This would read: The Ideal Yoast SEO Plugin Settings – Online Media Masters. An excerpt is simply an optional summary or description of a post taken from your content. The templates should not matter as long as you’re writing your SEO titles + meta descriptions, which you should.

Meta Robots – whether something is indexed in search engines

Date In Snippet Preview – enabling this shows each article’s publish date in search results. This can increase click-through rates for new content, but can decrease it for old content. You can include the “Last Updated” date in the very top of your posts (like I do) to make Google show this date instead, which will be more current than the publish date and keep CTRs up.

Example:
Last Updated July 13, 2017

Yoast SEO Meta Box – this is the content analysis (meta box) that helps you optimize content. You definitely want this for pages, posts, and blog category pages if you’re optimizing those.

Taxonomies

Noindexing tags prevents duplicate content penalties where the same content is on two pages.

Archives

Other

Subpages Of Archives – if you have content where a “next” button is used to get to /page2 then you want the FIRST page to appear in search results (not the second). Keep this checked.

3. Social

Filling out Yoast’s social settings helps Google learn about your profiles, but the main thing is enabling each social network’s meta data. This allows you to upload custom graphics to each page/post which makes it’s image thumbnail format properly when that page is shared on social media. This is what Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and Google+ meta data does.

Accounts

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

You will need to complete a few additional steps to verify your site with Pinterest.

Google+

Social Media Optimization – once meta data is enabled for each social network, you can upload custom social media images in the content analysis section using the “share” link (see below). This makes the content’s image thumbnail format properly when that page is shared on social media. Yes, this means you will need to create 2 separate graphics for each post.

• Facebook Image: 1200 x 628px
• Twitter Image: 1024 x 512px

4. XML Sitemaps

General

Submitting Your Yoast Sitemap To Google

• Go to SEO → XML Sitemaps
• Click the XML Sitemap button (see photo above)
• Copy the last past of the URL: /sitemap_index.xml
• Login to Google Search Console
• On the left, go to Crawl → Sitemap
• Paste the last part of the URL (screenshot below)
• Test and submit
• Repeat for Bing and Yandex

Post Types

Excluded Posts

Taxonomies

5. Advanced

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs – this is the navigation text that appears at the top of your content:

It helps users and search engines learn your content and site structure. I don’t use breadcrumbs to prevent clutter, but I recommend them if you don’t mind the extra text. To enable breadcrumbs, add this code to Editor → Index.php by pasting it under get_header();

get_header(); ?>
<div id="primary"> 
<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>');
} ?>
<div id="content" role="main">

Permalinks

Strip The Category Base From The Category URL – if your permalink structure has the word “category” in it (not preferred), this will remove it. Removing it can cause many of your URLs to change, so setting up a 301 redirect for each URL this affects is a good idea. However if the URLs have lots of traffic and links, it’s probably best you leave them and NOT enable this.

Redirect Attachment URL’s To Parent Post URLs – if people happen to find an image URL, PDF URL, or any file you upload to WordPress, enabling this will redirect visitors who find that file URL to the parent post URL (they will be redirected to the actual page it was uploaded to).

Remove Stop Words From Slugs – stop words are words like the, a, and, how, why… and other non-descriptive words you may not want included in your permalinks. While you may want to shorten permalinks to be more SEO-friendly, I do NOT recommend leaving this up to Yoastsince it can make your permalinks read funny. Instead, I would do this on a page/post basis.

Remove The ?replytocom Variables – removes these types of URLs: http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/#comment-110294 which is good since it prevents duplicate content and improves search engine crawling efficiency. This Moz thread explains it well.

Redirect Ugly URL’s To Clean Permalinks – if people use an incorrect letter or parameter when linking to you, this tries to redirect people to the correct URL, but is not recommended.

RSS

In your RSS feed, here’s what will appear before each post…

%%BLOGLINK%%
%%BLOGDESCLINK%%

And here’s what will appear after each post…

%%POSTLINK%%
%%AUTHORLINK%%

6. Tools

Bulk Editor – edit SEO titles and meta descriptions in bulk (without having to go through each individual page/post). Making sure these ready nicely can significantly increase click-through rates by making your snippets more appealing to click on. Don’t forget to include that post’s focus keyword in both places. SNIPPETS ARE LITERALLY THE FOREFRONT OF YOUR SEO!

File Editor – edit robots.txt and .htaccess files.