WordPress SEO Tutorial: Yoast SEO Plugin Configuration Guide

This post is part of my guide about how to start a blog. Read the full guide to learn all the steps involved in creating a blog from scratch.

This post is a complete guide on WordPress SEO and how to improve the SEO of your WordPress site using the Yoast SEO Plugin.

What is SEO?

SEO is the abbreviation from search engine optimization, and it refers to the process of making your website as visible as possible for the search engines.

The search engine optimization topic is very complex and there is an abundance of aspects to be discussed.

The algorithms of the search engines also keep improving to give the user the best search results and the so-called “SEO best practices” are continually changing.

If you want an SEO optimized site, you have to keep up with all these changes and regularly make modifications to the structure of your site and your site’s content accordingly.

There are just too many aspects of SEO to be covered in a single post. For now, just keep in mind that SEO is the process by which you optimize your site for the search engines.

Is WordPress SEO friendly?

WordPress is unquestionably more SEO friendly than many of the most popular CMS (content management systems) that exist. WordPress has been conceived as a blogging platform and is intended for sites focused on content.

Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t include all the required SEO features.

There are a few settings of the core script that will improve some SEO aspects of your site. However, by default, WordPress still lacks most of the needed SEO features.

Luckily, you can easily improve this aspect with the help of an SEO plugin. A plugin is just a script designed to extend WordPress capabilities, without the need to be a programmer.

There are many free and premium plugins for WordPress which are designed to turn this platform into a true friend of the search engines.

WordPress Core SEO Features

Even though you are going to use a plugin to boost the SEO of our blog, there are also a few things that you change from the core settings in order to improve the SEO level of WordPress.

1. Check if WordPress allows search engines to index your site

WordPress asks you whether if you want to allow or not the search engines to index your site during the installation process.

Some people don’t know at that point the purpose of this setting, and they might enable this option.

To check the status of this option, go to “Settings–>Reading” and make sure that the “Search Engine Visibility” setting is not checked.

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2. Change WordPress Permalinks Structure

The first thing you need to do is to change the structure of the default WordPress permalinks.

By default, WordPress has a structure for the permalinks which is not SEO friendly.

When you first install WordPress, your site’s permalinks will be set to a “plain” structure and your site’s URL will look like in the screenshot below.

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Not only that the structure of this URL is hideous, but it’s also not a recommended structure for SEO.

To fix this, go to “Settings–>Permalinks” menu.

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Then, look for the “Common Settings” section and switch from “Plain” to “Post name“.

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While a permalink structure that includes the post date is considered OK by many people, I always set this option to “Post name.”

Also, search engines seem to prefer the shorter URLs instead of the longer URLs.

Optionally, you can change the base URL of your site’s categories and tags.

I usually just leave the defaults (leave these fields empty for that).

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3. Allow people to post comments

WordPress has a built-in commenting system. You can allow people to comment only when they have an account, comment as a guest by providing a name and email address, or you can disable the comments entirely.

While I don’t know for sure if the user comments are a clear benefit for SEO, I’ve often noticed that the posts with a lot of comments tend to rank better than posts that have no comments.

I don’t know if this is a pure coincidence, if the search engines consider these comments to be page content, or if the user comments represent a trust factor for search engines. However, allowing users to add comments have also other benefits.

Before allowing users to comment on your blog, make sure you install the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin or another plugin with a similar role. Otherwise, your blog will quickly receive hundreds of automatically spam comments from bots.

To manage the commenting settings, go to “Settings–>Discussion” menu.

There are more settings concerning the comments, and you can configure these based on your likes. Below is a screenshot of the settings I use for my site.

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What I used to do in the past was to only allow the register users to comment on my articles. Now, I consider that to be a bad idea because only a low percentage of your site’s visitors will register an account on your site.

I also used to enable the “break comments into pages with” option to improve the page loading time. That’s also something I gave up doing because most of the pages that rank very good in Google have a lot of comments and these are always on the same page.

I don’t worry about the page speed anymore because I use a caching plugin now and the page should load fast even when a high number of comments are displayed.

To avoid any kind of spam, I approve all the comments manually.

I also like to display the newer comments first in the list of comments so that people won’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see the most recent comments.

That’s all that we can do from the core settings of WordPress. We are going to do anything else with the help of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Improve WordPress SEO with Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

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Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, with over 5 million installations according to the info provided by WordPress.org plugin directory.

There are many other plugins for this purpose, but I’ve used the Yoast SEO plugin for years, and I’m very pleased with it.

Yoast SEO has a free and a premium version.

This tutorial will only cover the features available in the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin because that’s what I use. Feel free to upgrade to the premium version for better support and extra features.

Yoast SEO Plugin Installation

If you haven’t installed the Yoast SEO plugin, go to “Plugins–>Add new“.

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In the search form from the top-right side of the page, type “Yoast SEO” and WordPress will search for the plugin in the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Locate the plugin called “Yoast SEO” in the list of the plugins found and click the “Install Now” button to install the plugin.

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Wait a few seconds until the plugin is downloaded and installed to your web server.

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If the plugin has been installed and activated successfully, you should see the “Plugin activated” message at the top of the next page.

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The Yoast SEO plugin will add a new WordPress menu called “SEO“. All the options of the plugin can be found under this menu.

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By default, you will only see three submenus under this menu: Dashboard, Search Console and Premium. There are also a few hidden submenus that can be enabled from “SEO–>Dashboard–>Features” if you enable the “Advanced settings pages” option.

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After you enable the advanced settings page, save the changes and reload the page, new submenus will appear. Below is a screenshot of the menu now.

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Yoast SEO Plugin Configuration

Currently, you can configure the Yoast Plugin in two ways:

A. Configure Yoast SEO plugin using plugin’s configuration wizard
B. Configure Yoast SEO plugin going manually through the setting tabs

The configuration wizard will take you step-by-step through some of the basic options of the plugin in the simplest way possible.

The second approach allows you to manage all the advanced settings of the plugin.

A. Configure Yoast SEO plugin using plugin’s configuration wizard

To access the configuration wizard, go to “SEO–>Dashboard–>General tab” and click the “Open the configuration wizard” button.

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A twelve-steps configuration wizard will open.

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Click the “Configure Yoast SEO” button.

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For the “Step 2“, select “Option A: My site is live and ready to be indexed.”

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For the “Step 3“, select the specific of your site. If your site is a blog, select “A blog.”
If has another purpose, select the corresponding option.

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For the “Step 4“, select if your site belongs to a person or a company. This information will be used by the Google’s Knowledge Graph Card (the information you sometimes see on the right side of the search results).

See an example of Google’s Knowledge Graph below.

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Specific options will appear based on your selection.

If you select “Company“, will appear a box for providing company’s name and an option that allows you to upload company’s logo image.

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If you select “Person“, you will need to enter your full name in the text field that appears.

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Optionally, for the “Step 5“, enter your social profiles. These will be displayed in Google’s Knowledge Graph. If you don’t have social profiles, just leave all the fields empty and click “Next.”

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For the “Step 6“, specify which post types you want search engines to index. The default settings are already what you want, so just click “Next.”

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For the “Step 7“, you will be asked if you want to disable the post author archive.
By default, every post author has a page which once accessed will display all the posts from that author (see an example at https://antreno.com/author/marius/).

Some people like to deactivate these archive pages to avoid duplicated content. If you are the only author, the same content will appear on your blog’s index, in categories (if you only have one category), in tags (if you add the same tags to all your posts), etc.

However, you can also avoid the duplicated content issue without disabling the author archive if you set the author archives as “Noindex” from the advanced settings of Yoast SEO plugin.

For my blog, I have only set these to “Noindex” and removed them from the sitemap so the search engines won’t index these pages, but I haven’t completely disabled the author archive. If disabled, the author archive page will just redirect you to the homepage of your site when is accessed.

So, in my case, I would have set this option to “Yes.”

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At “Step 8“, you will need to get an authorization code from Google and connect your site to Google Console. This will allow Yoast SEO plugin to get the crawl errors from your Google Console account and display them straight on your WordPress dashboard.

You must have your site already added to Google Console and have its ownership confirmed.

Click on “Get Google Authorization Code” to receive an authorization code from Google.

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If you are not logged in into your Google account, log in. If you have multiple accounts, select the account that has been used for adding your site to Google Console.

A new browser window will open and you need to grant access for the Yoast SEO plugin to “View and manage Search Console data for your verified sites” by clicking the “Allow” button.

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You should next receive an authorization code.

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Copy that code, paste it into plugin’s configuration wizard and click the “Authenticate” button.

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If the connection with Google Console has been established successfully, you should now see a “Select profile” option.
You have to select your site from the list and click on “Next” to proceed to the next step.

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At “Step 9“, you have to enter a name for your site (you’ll probably already see a title) and a separator for the page title.

Example of post title where a separator is used:

Complete SEO Guide – Antreno Digital

The hyphen (“-“) between “SEO Guide” and “Antreno Digital” is the separator.

The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to choose between a few different symbols. I usually just use the hyphen since it looks more natural.

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The “Step 10” is only an invitation to subscribe to the newsletter of the company who has developed the plugin.

It’s not mandatory to subscribe to the newsletter and you can simply leave the fields empty if you don’t want to.

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The “Step 11” is just a section where you receive some video recommendations. Nothing to do here, just click the “next” button.

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The “Step 12” will just announce you that you have successfully configured the plugin’s settings. You can now close the configuration wizard.

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B. Configure Yoast SEO plugin going manually through the setting tabs

If you want to be able to configure all the advanced settings of the Yoast SEO plugin, this is the best approach.

Further, I will take you through every option available and explain its role.

1. Dashboard

A. Dashboard

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Under “Dashboard” tab, you will only see a list of SEO problems and notifications. There aren’t any options here.

B. General

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Under this tab, you can find the link for opening the configuration wizard, a text link counter, Yoast SEO developer credits, and an option that enables you to restore all the plugin’s settings to their default value.

Configuration wizard

The configuration wizard takes you step-by-step through a few basic settings of the plugin. I have already covered the configuration wizard in detail above in this post.

Text link counter

To give you the best recommendations, the Yoast SEO plugin needs to know the number of links you have included in your posts. If executed, this will scan all your posts and will count the number of links included in their content.

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Credits

If you click the “View credits” button, you will only see the list of people who have contributed to the development of Yoast SEO plugin.

Nothing to do here.

Restore default settings

This section allows you to restore plugin’s settings to their default value.

C. Features

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This section allows you to enable or disable some of the features of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Readability analysis

This features analyzes your post content and displays a “readability” status in the “Publish” panel.

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The readability score is improved when you write shorter phrases, when your content paragraphs are not very long and when you write easy-to-read content.

It’s a handy feature which I usually leave enabled, but don’t stress too much about it.

Keyword analysis

This option enables or disables the keyword analysis section under the content of your posts.

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Leave this features enabled since will help you to determine if your article is properly optimized for a specific keyword.

Advanced settings pages

Not all the Yoast SEO plugin options are visible when you install the plugin.

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If you enable this option, additional submenus will appear under the SEO menu.

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I always enable this option since I also use many of the advanced features of this plugin.

Ryte

Ryte is an SEO service for monitoring your website’s on-page factors and notifies you when errors and aspects that can be improved are found.

Yoast integrates this service in their plugin and Ryte performs a daily check if your site is still indexable by search engines if this option is enabled.

I usually leave this option enabled.

Admin bar menu

If you leave this option enabled, Yoast plugin will display an icon in your WordPress admin bar. If you place your mouse cursor over this icon, you will see a list of useful links to external sites.

On the single post pages, a colored dot icon will also appear and its color will change depending on how good that post is optimized for the search engines.

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I like to keep this option enabled.

Cornerstone content

This is a relatively new feature of the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.

If you leave this option enabled, a checkbox for setting a post or page as cornerstone content will appear under the “Focus keyword” box.

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Only your best and most comprehensive posts should be marked as cornerstone content.

For example, I’ve set my guide about how to start a blog as cornerstone content because this will be a complete guide for starting a blog.

If a post is tagged as “cornerstone”, the plugin will make additional checks concerning the internal posts that link to that article and give you additional suggestions on how to improve the visibility of this content.

Text link counter

This feature lets Yoast plugin help you improve the internal link structure of your site.

If this feature is enabled, the plugin will count the internal links of a post and notify you if you can make adjustments.

D. Your Info

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Under this tab, you have to set the name for your site and choose whether if the site belongs to a company or a person.

Based on your selection, different fields will become visible.

This info will be used by Google’s Knowledge Graph Card to display site’s information on the search results page when someone searches your website on Google.

Here’s an example.

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E. Webmaster Tools

The “Webmaster Tools” section enables you to confirm the ownership of your site for the Webmaster Tools service of the major search engines: Google, Bing, and Yandex.

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After you add your site to these services, you will be asked to add a meta tag to your site’s head area to confirm that you are the site owner.

Instead of editing the code of your theme, Yoast SEO plugin enables you to add the verification code to your site from this section.

F. Security

There is only one option under this section.

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If the “Advanced part of the Yoast SEO meta box” option is disabled, only the site administrators can noindex posts and change the canonical URL. Otherwise, all the users will be able to change these settings.

I recommend leaving this option disabled.

2. Titles & Metas

This submenu contains a list of settings for the page titles and the meta tags display between the HTML head tags.

A. General

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Force rewrite titles

The Yoast SEO plugin rewrites the titles of your posts and pages.

Sometimes, the themes and other plugins will also try to set a specific structure for these titles.

The Yoast SEO plugin will also try to set a specific structure for these titles and these might result in duplicated titles and errors.

If you notice your site has duplicate title tags or errors between the head tags in page’s HTML source code, enable this option, and the issues should disappear.

Title Separator

A separator will be displayed between post title and the name of a category, tag, author, etc.

Example:

Case Studies Archives – Antreno Digital

The hyphen is the separator in this case.

Choose a separator from the available symbols. I usually leave this option to the default value, which is the hyphen.

B. Homepage

Under this section, you can control the title and the meta description of your site’s homepage.

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If you use a static front page as your homepage, you will see only a link to the edit page of these pages, and you can edit its details directly from there.

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C. Post Types

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This section enables you to edit the structure of the titles and the default descriptions of all the registered WordPress post types.

You can also choose if you want to allow the search engines to index these post types, if you want to see the date in the preview snippet (a demo of what the post will look in the search results) and if you want to display the Yoast SEO options meta box for particular post types.

If your theme and plugins don’t register additional post types, you will only see options for posts, pages, and media. Otherwise, you will see more post types.

– Posts (post)

Title template: I usually just leave the default value. I will set a unique title for each post.
Meta description template: I leave this field empty because I don’t want the same meta description for all the posts. I will set a unique meta description for each post.
Meta Robots: I always set this to “Index”. Otherwise, the search engines won’t index my posts.
Date in Snippet Preview: I don’t need the date in the preview snippet so I just set this option to “Hide”.
Yoast SEO Meta Box: I always set this to “Show”, so I can customize the meta info for each of my posts.

– Pages (page)

Title template: I usually just leave the default value. I will set a unique title for each page.
Meta description template: I leave this field empty because I don’t want the same meta description for all the pages. I will set a unique meta description for each page.
Meta Robots: I always set this to “Index”. Otherwise, the search engines won’t index my pages.
Date in Snippet Preview: I don’t need the date in the preview snippet so I just set this option to “Hide”.
Yoast SEO Meta Box: I always set this to “Show”, so I can customize the meta info for each of my pages.

– Media (attachment)

By default, every WordPress image uploaded using the media library has its own URL. This means that every image has its own page and if you access the attachment URL, you will only see an image on a single page.

If you want to see the URL of an image uploaded to your site, go to “Media–>Library,” click on an image and click on “View attachment page”.

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I have never found a useful role for having an accessible URL for each attachment, so I will completely disable this later (Yoast SEO plugin has an option for that).

I will just set the following:

Title template: Leave this to the default value.
Meta description template: Leave this empty.
Meta Robots: I don’t want the search engines to be able to index the attachments’ URLs.
Date in Snippet Preview: I don’t need this option enabled.
Yoast SEO Meta Box: Because I will completely disable the URLs of the attachments, I don’t need this feature and will just set this option to “Hide”.

D. Taxonomies

Under this section, you will find the options for setting the titles, meta descriptions, meta robots, and the Yoast meta box visibility for the categories, tags, post formats and every other post type registered by your theme and plugins.

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– Categories (category)

Title template: I leave the default value.
Meta description template: I leave this field blank since I don’t want a general meta description for all my categories.
Meta Robots: I set this to “Index”.
Yoast SEO Meta Box: I set this to “Show”.

– Tags (post_tag)

Title template: I leave the default value.
Meta description template: I leave this field blank since I don’t want a general meta description for all my tags.
Meta Robots: I set this to “Noindex” since I don’t want my tags to be indexed.
Yoast SEO Meta Box: I set this to “Show”.

– Format (post_format)

WordPress supports multiple formats for the post types.

If your theme or plugins don’t make use of these post formats, there’s no use of this post format so I entirely disable this by setting the “Format-based archives” to “Disabled.”

E. Archives

WordPress archives are the post author pages, the pages that display your posts based on a specific date, the search results, etc.

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– Author archives settings

Author archives: Some people like to disable these, but I usually leave the author archives enabled.
Title template: I just leave the default value.
Meta description template: I just leave this field empty.
Meta Robots: I don’t want search engines to index the post author archives, so I just set this to “noindex”. This will prevent some issues with duplicated content if your site has a single author.

– Date archives settings

Date archives: I leave the date archives enabled.
Title template: I just leave the default value.
Meta description template: I just leave this field empty.
Meta Robots: Just as for the author archives, I set the meta robots for the date archives to “noindex”.

F. Other

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Subpages of archives

This set to “noindex”, this page will stop the search engines from indexing the pages created by your site’s pagination. For example https://antreno.com/blog/page/2/, https://antreno.com/blog/page/3/, etc.

I don’t want these pages to be indexed, so I just set this option to “noindex”.

Use meta keywords tag?

In the past, besides the page title and meta description, there was another important meta tag called “meta keywords”. This value of this meta tag was designed to contain a list of keywords that described the content of your site.

Based on these keywords, the search engines understood what is that page about, and then rank your site for these particular keywords.

However, there have been numerous abuses of this meta tag and nowadays, this tag is entirely ignored by the search engines. Therefore, there’s no need for enabling this option.

3. Social

If you don’t have any social accounts, you can skip the settings concerning this menu.

A. Accounts

Under this tab, you can provide the URLs of your social profiles and pages for some of the most popular social networks. These will be used by Google’s Knowledge Graph card (Google may display information about your site directly in the search results when someone looks for your site).

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B. Facebook

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Facebook settings

If you enable this option, the Yoast SEO plugin will add additional metadata tags to the HMTL head section of your site. Facebook and a few other social networks use this data when your pages are shared to pull the best image and content from your site.

I recommend you to enable this option.

Default settings

If the shared URL doesn’t have a featured image, you can set a default image to be displayed (for example your site’s logo).

Facebook Insights and Admins

Facebook has discontinued the Facebook Domain Insights service and API. Therefore, you can simply ignore this option.

C. Twitter

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Just as Facebook uses Open Graph, Twitter also has its own recognized meta tags for displaying the best image and content when someone shares your posts.

Add Twitter card meta data

If you enable this option, Twitter’s meta tags will be added to the HMTL head area of your site.

The default card type to use

I don’t know the exact difference between the two options available, but I just use “Summary with large image.”

D. Pinterest

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When you add a website to your Pinterest profile, same as for the Google Console, you will be required to confirm that you are the owner of that site by placing a meta tag between the HTML head tags.

Instead of editing your theme’s code, you can confirm site ownership by placing the meta tag in the “Pinterest confirmation” field.

E. Google Plus

If you have a Google+ page for your company, add that URL in the “Google Publisher Page” field and link it to your Google+ about page.

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4. XML Sitemaps

An XML Sitemap is a powerful SEO tool for any site.

It’s not enough to only create high-quality content and expect the search engines to find you.

If you intend to attract organic traffic from the search engines to your site, you first must have your site’s pages indexed by the search engines.

But how do you notify the search engines when new content has been published on your site?

The easiest way to achieve this is with the help of an XML Sitemap.

While at its core is only a file that contains a list of your site’s links, a sitemap can make a huge difference for the time your site’s pages are indexed.

But it’s not enough to have a sitemap. You first need to add your site to the webmaster tools services of the major search engines and then submit your XML sitemap to these.

This way, every time you add a new post to your site and your site’s XML sitemap changes, the search engines will know.

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin includes a feature for generating an XML sitemap automatically for your website whenever you add new content to your site.

To enable the XML sitemap feature of Yoast SEO, you have to enable the “XML sitemap functionality” option.

Once you enable this option, a few sitemap-related options will also become available.

A. General

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Your XML Sitemap

This section contains a link to your site’s sitemap. The sitemap generated by the Yoast SEO plugin is available at yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. Replace “yourdomain.com” with your domain name.

If you get a 404 when you access the sitemap URL in your web browser, you have to rebuild your blog’s permalinks.

To do that, go to “Settings–>Permalinks” and simply click the “Save Changes” button, without making any changes to the structure of the permalinks.

Entries per sitemap page

You can set the maximum number of pages displayed in the sitemap. I just leave the default value, which is 1000.

If your site starts receiving memory timeout issues related to the sitemap, lower this number.

B. User sitemap

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From this tab, you can choose whether to include or not the author/user archive URLs in the XML sitemap.

I have already set the post author archive URL as noindex, so there’s no point to include these URLs into the sitemap. Therefore, I’ll just disable this option.

C. Post Types

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Post types sitemap settings

Choose which are the post types included in the sitemap.

If your theme or plugins also register additional post types, those will be listed here.

I’ve included the posts and pages and excluded the media attachment URLs. I have already set the attachments as noindex, and I will disable the attachment URL completely, so I will also exclude these from the sitemap.

D. Excluded Posts

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Excluded posts settings

This option allows you to exclude specific post IDs from the sitemap. Just enter the IDs of the post you want to exclude separated by a comma and the posts will be removed from the sitemap.

E. Taxonomies

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Taxonomies sitemap settings

This option allows you to exclude specific taxonomies for being shown in your site’s sitemap.

I have included the post categories and excluded the tags.

5. Advanced

A. Breadcrumbs

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Enable Breadcrumbs

The Yoast SEO plugin has a built-in function for displaying breadcrumbs for your site. However, to show the breadcrumbs, you will have to add a small piece of PHP code to your WordPress theme in the place where you want the breadcrumbs to be displayed.

See more info about this in the Yoast SEO plugin knowledge base.

The breadcrumbs are disabled by default, but you can activate this feature if you like.

I’m using the Genesis Framework as a parent theme for my blog and it already has a built-in feature for displaying breadcrumbs. So, I don’t use the Yoast SEO breadcrumbs on my site.

When you enable the breadcrumbs, a few options related to this feature will show up.

The first options allow you to select a separator for the breadcrumbs and change some text labels.

Show Blog page

This option will only be available if you use a static page as your homepage. If enabled, a link to your blog will be shown in the breadcrumbs trail.

Bold the last page

If you want the last breadcrumb location to be displayed with a bold text, enable this option.

Taxonomy to show in breadcrumbs for post types

This option allows you to display the post category, tag, or format before the post title in the breadcrumbs. Leave this option to “none” to display only the post title.

How to insert breadcrumbs in your theme

This section only contains a link to the breadcrumbs knowledge base.

B. Permalinks

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Strip the category base

By default, WordPress includes a “category” slug in the URLs of the post categories. While you can change this label from the WordPress core settings, there’s no option for removing this completely from the URL of the categories.

Fortunately, the Yoast SEO plugin includes a feature that allows you to do that.

This is how the URL of my “Case Studies” category looked before enabling this option.

https://antreno.com/category/case-studies/

If you enable this option, the plugin will remove the “category” slug, and your categories will get a cleaner and shorter URL.

This is how the URL looks after I have enabled this option.

https://antreno.com/case-studies/

Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL

Earlier this post, I talked about the fact that every image uploaded to your server using the WordPress Media manager has a publicly accessible URL.

I have never found a purpose for this, and a reason to leave the attachment URL enabled, so I just redirect these URLs to the URL of the post the attachments belong to.

Again, I can do this very easy with the help of the Yoast SEO plugin. I just set this option to “Redirect” and the plugin takes care of that.

Stop words in slugs

There are some words which are called in SEO terms “stop words.”

The SEO stop words are very common words that most search engines choose to ignore.

Many SEO experts recommend you to remove these from the URLs of your pages and avoid as much as you can using these words in the page titles and meta description.

However, if you remove too many stop words from your titles and meta descriptions, you might end up with very strange looking text.

The WordPress SEO plugin has a feature that can remove these stop words from the slugs of your posts and pages if enabled.

I usually disable this function because I sometimes like to optimize the slugs manually and I sometimes keep some stop words in the URLs for a better readability and a more natural look.

For instance, see the URL of my post about how to install WordPress.

This time, I chose to leave the stop words “how” and “to” in the URL.

Remove the ?replytocom variables

WordPress has a built-in feature called threaded comments. If this feature is enabled, your site will have the user comments displayed on multiple levels.

A “?replytocom” variable and comment ID are added at the end of the URL to allow the threaded comments feature to function even when a user has JavaScript disabled in his browser (an insignificant percentage). This, however, can make the search engines to think that those are all different URLs and will index the same page multiple times, which can lead to duplicate content issues.

The Yoast SEO plugin can remove this variable and save you from SEO issues.

I recommend you set this option to “Remove.”

Redirect ugly URLs to clean permalinks

This feature of Yoast SEO allows you to redirect the messy URLs to the base permalink.

For example, if someone links to one of my posts with the following URL:

https://antreno.com/how-to-get-your-website-on-google/#m1km2k342342387832

Even though has added “#m1km2k342342387832” after the permalink, the URL is still accessible.

If you enable this feature, the plugin will just redirect that URL to the base permalink, which in this case is “https://antreno.com/how-to-get-your-website-on-google/”.

This function will also remove the query vars added by some plugins and result in these not to function correctly.

You won’t need this feature in most of the cases so to avoid any future problems, just leave this feature set to “No redirect”.

C. RSS

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The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to enable content syndication sites and feed readers to display updates from your blog. WordPress automatically generates an RSS feed for your site’s content, accessible at yoursite.com/feed (eg. https://antreno.com/feed/).

The RSS feed is not designed to be read directly by humans, but processed by the feed readers and then displayed as human-readable content.

The Yoast SEO plugin enables you to add a link before or after the post content in the RSS feed. This way the sites that display your RSS feed will also show these links back to your site, helping search engines to identify you as the original creator of the content.

You can just leave the plugin’s default message, or create a custom message using the variables available.

6. Tools

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This menu gives you access to a few handy tools.

Bulk editor

If you want to quickly edit or add SEO titles and meta descriptions to your posts and pages, this is the place to do it.

The bulk editor lists all your posts, pages, and custom post types for which you can add SEO titles and meta descriptions and allows you to make the changes in bulk, without having to edit every individual item.

At the top of the page, two tabs allow you to switch between editing the post titles and descriptions.

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File editor

The file editor allows you to edit the robots.txt file (or to create this file) and the .htaccess file if your site runs on a web server powered by Apache.

Import and Export

If you want to use the same configuration for the Yoast SEO plugin for other sites you manage, make a backup of your settings, or if you just want to share your setup with a friend, this section enables you to do that.

The options are divided into three tabs.

– Import settings

This option allows you to upload the Yoast SEO configuration file from a .zip archive.

– Export settings

This option allows you to export your site’s Yoast SEO configuration file to a .zip archive.

– Import from other SEO plugins

Apart from the fact that you can import the configuration from another website that uses the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, you can also import the settings from other WordPress SEO plugins.

Below are the available plugins.

• HeadSpace2
• All-in-One SEO
• Jetpack SEO
• WooThemes SEO framework
• wpSEO

If your current plugin or theme is not on this list, you can also try the SEO Data Transporter plugin from StudioPress.

7. Search Console

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Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service offered by Google to site owners. This service allows webmasters to check the indexing status of their websites in Google search and enables owners to perform various actions for improving the visibility of their sites.

Yoast SEO integrates the Google Console API to retrieve your site’s data from this service and displays the crawl issues to the “Search Console” menu of Yoast SEO plugin.

The “crawl” data is collected after Google’s crawlers (bots) visit your site’s pages. If some pages have been removed, are not accessible anymore, are temporarily down, pages do not allow indexing, etc., the crawlers will report this to Google.

You need to keep track of these crawl errors so you can fix them as fast as possible.

For the plugin to be allowed to access the data from your Google Search Console account, you first need to get an authorization code from Google and paste that into the settings of Yoast SEO.

I have already explained this process in detail earlier in this post (see the step 8 of the “A. Configure Yoast SEO plugin using plugin’s configuration wizard section”), so I won’t cover this step again.

This is not a mandatory feature for SEO and you also have access to the crawl data of your site into your Google Console account. Still, if you want this data to be at your fingertips, you can connect the SEO plugin to your Search Console account.

8. Premium

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I use the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin for my site. However, there is also a paid version of the plugin that contains extra features and a premium support.

There are no settings to configure here. In this section, there are only described a few of the benefits for upgrading to the premium version.

Since I don’t have access to the features available in the premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin, I cannot include these in my guide.

A few of the features available only in the paid version are:

• Redirect manager (redirect dead links) – create and manage redirects from your WordPress site.
• Multiple focus keywords – optimize a single post for up to five different keywords.
• Social previews – check how your Facebook or Twitter posts will look like.
• Premium support – gain access to a 24/7 support team.

Conclusion

The SEO topic is very complex and besides the optimization you must make at your site’s level, there are also off-site actions you need to consider if you want your website to rank well in the organic results of the search engines.

Google has over 200 ranking factors and signals. Amongst these, we find the domain age, content length, page loading speed (read my guide on how to improve the speed of your WordPress site), content updates frequency, number of backlinks and internal links, HTML errors, page age, and many more.

Even though this guide has over 6000 words, I have covered only a few aspects concerning the SEO of WordPress and how to improve the WordPress SEO with the help of the Yoast SEO plugin.

There are also additional actions you need to take when you create your content. I will just mention a few of them.

You first have to do a keyword research and find the right keywords to optimize your posts for. Then, you have to write content optimized for the chosen keywords.

You should create media-rich content (using text, images, videos, links, etc.) and optimize the images of your blog by adding a descriptive value for their “alt” tag.

Structure the content using the proper HTML heading tags and include internal and external links in your posts.

Find the best titles for your pages to get the highest CTR possible from the search results, and write comprehensive posts to keep a low visitor bounce rate.

There are many other aspects to consider when you write your content. Read my post on how to write SEO friendly content for more information about this aspect.

You can follow the guide and customize the settings of the Yoast SEO plugin one by one, or you can just download my Yoast SEO configuration and import it to your site by going to SEO –> Tools –> Import and Export –> Import Settings tab.

I hope you’ll find this guide helpful. If so, feel free to share it with your friends and followers on the social networks.

If you have any questions concerning this topic, leave a comment below.