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Written By :Gigde

Mon Nov 06 2023

5 min read

Yoast SEO Tutorial: Learn How to Optimize Your Website

Home >> Blogs >> Yoast SEO Tutorial: Learn How to Optimize Your Website

Yoast SEO is a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) plugin used in WordPress, a content management system for website building. Since SEO helps websites reach the top of the search results page, most business startups and firms use Yoast SEO for its accessibility and availability of time-saving tools. Moreover, it is ideal for beginners since the Yoast SEO tutorial and guide are available to assist with technical and content optimization.

Yoast SEO offers many features to create search engine-friendly content suitable for customers. Besides, it helps your business identify and find new visitors by guaranteeing a high-performance website. It boosts your website to a good ranking in search engine results and expands your business to a large global market. It also ensures your business's credibility and website usability by promising responsive web pages with balanced SEO factors like focus keywords, backlinks, meta tags, content quality, images, etc.

When looking at the history of Yoast SEO, Joost de Valk, the founder, developed it as a WordPress plugin and named it WordPress SEO in 2007. Later, in 2012, its premium version got launched as Yoast SEO. However, different versions of Yoast SEO are coming out with improved highlighting features and enhancements. Besides, it is a user-friendly and feature-rich SEO solution.

In this blog, therefore, we will observe more about Yoast SEO for beginners as follows:

Step-by-step Yoast SEO tutorial on installation
Yoast SEO Features and Settings
Content Optimization with Yoast SEO
Technical SEO with Yoast SEO
Advanced Yoast SEO techniques

How to Install Yoast SEO Plugin on WordPress?

Since WordPress lacks the features for top ranking on search engine results, the Yoast SEO plugin is the best SEO plugin for WordPress, among many other plugins. Besides, it is easy for you to install and set up this plugin for your website.

Given below is the step-by-step Yoast SEO tutorial for installing it on WordPress:

Installation and Activation

Step 1: Log in to WordPress

Enter your username/email address and password for login. Then you'll jump into the WordPress Dashboard.

Step 2: Click the 'Plugins' option

On the left side of the dashboard, you will see many options on the menu. One of these options is 'Plugins'. Click on the tab.

Step 3: Search 'Yoast SEO' in the search plugins tab

On the top of the Plugin screen of the WordPress site, you will see the 'Add New' tab. Click on that. Here, you will see the tab 'search plugins'. Now, type 'Yoast SEO' on the search bar for the Yoast SEO option on the search results.

Step 4: Install Yoast SEO

You can click the 'Install Now' button to install the plugin for WordPress.

Step 5: Activate Yoast SEO

After installing the Yoast SEO, you can activate the plugin by clicking the 'Activate' button.

Now it is ready for configurations and using features for the WordPress websites.

Configuration and set up

Import data, settings and configurations

If you are using other SEO Plugins, you must import the necessary data and settings for reusing and changing files for your SEO. You select the 'Import and Export' on the 'Tools' options on the dashboard. Then, click 'Import from other SEO plugins'. For importing settings, you can click the 'Import Settings' button.

Run Configuration Wizard

Running the configuration wizard, you can configure basic settings like site type, organization or personal, title settings, search engine visibility, and multiple authors.

Configure General Settings

Configure settings like the dashboard, features, integration, and tools.

These steps are ideal Yoast SEO tutorial guides for beginners for setting and configuring SEO for optimizing your content and web pages.

What are the Advantages of Using Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO offers many features for improving the website's performance in search engine results. Besides, the importance of Yoast SEO in WordPress is its accessibility and many benefits, like increased traffic, streamlined SEO, better user experience, and, most importantly, improved search engine ranking.

Given below are some of the significant advantages of Yoast SEO that make it stand out from other plugins:

Content Analysis: Real-time content analysis is the most crucial feature of Yoast SEO because it enables you to assess the critical aspects of your website content. That means you can check for factors like the focus keyword density, readability score, transition word usage, passive voice, etc. You can look for internal links, SEO title length, keyphrase length, text length, image alt attributes, etc. Besides, it provides a snippet preview of the page in the Google search to see how it gets displayed in the search results. If you need high-quality content for your website, check out our professional content writing services
Readability Analysis: Yoast SEO evaluates the content for consecutive sentences, paragraph length, sentence length, passive voice, transition words, and word complexity since it is essential for user engagement.
XML Sitemaps: One of the significant Yoast SEO features is XML Sitemaps, for helping search engines find your crucial web pages and keep them up-to-date. They are roadmaps that ensure that search engines find and crawl the significant web pages of your website. Here, Yoast SEO automates the sitemap index whenever there is an update in the website structure. Moreover, it lists web pages to make them discoverable for users in search engines.
Canonical URLs: Another Yoast SEO feature is the canonical URLs that avoid duplicate content from your website. In other words, it prevents search engine crawlers from getting confused with the content of multiple URLs.
Redirect Management: Yoast SEO has a redirect management facility to create and support essential redirects to prevent users from using the wrong websites or web pages. Redirects occur whenever the content publisher deletes or changes the URL of a website. For example, when the user visits the website's old version, they see a 404 error page and thus redirects the user to the new version.
Social Media Integration: Social media integration is one of the essential Yoast SEO benefits, optimizing social media posts and pages. It offers tools for content type, page title, website name, etc. Besides, this plugin provides a search engine preview of your social media page with a title, image, description etc. Our social media marketing services can help you reach your target audience and grow your business online.

There are Yoast SEO tutorial guides for using each feature for each purpose in search engine optimization.

How to Use Yoast Seo Plugin for Content Optimization?

Content Optimization is the crucial SEO strategy to reach on top of the search engine results and gain more visitors to your website. SEO focuses on on-page SEO, like keywords, meta tags, meta descriptions, images, titles, URLs, etc. Therefore, to optimize your content using Yoast SEO, there is some critical process to follow, like keyword research, website structure, and copywriting. So how doyou optimize content for SEO using Yoast SEO?

To optimise your online content and increase the visibility of your website in search engine results, take advantage of our first-rate SEO copywriting services.

Build webpage: The first step for content optimization is creating the post or pages for your website representing the style representing the brand and your business. Additionally, the webpage must achieve the organizational goals and objectives.
Keyword Research: You can list top-ranking words and phrases that customers type in the search engine through keyword research. You can also identify secondary keywords, long-tail keywords, etc. Besides, it allows you to understand the search intent of each focus keyword to incorporate them on your website. Here you can use keyword research tools to identify and find relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition. For more tips and guides, you can refer to Yoast SEO tutorial guides to understand content optimization with this plugin. Improve your website's search engine ranking with our comprehensive keyword research and analysis services
Content Analysis: After creating the website content, you can examine the webpage for factors like focus keyword density, metatags, meta description, readability score, transition word usage, passive voice, etc. Besides, you can evaluate the internal links, SEO title length, keyphrase length, text length, image alt attributes, etc. Here, you can learn and implement the ideal length for a paragraph, title, subheadings, etc.

Tips for content SEO:

Use relevant keywords with high search volume and less competition
Never over stuff keywords
Spread the keywords throughout your content
Use visuals
Update titles, URLs, meta tags and meta descriptions.

How to do Technical SEO with Yoast SEO?

Technical SEO is a significant aspect of the website to increase its ranking on the search engine results page. It focuses on website architecture, page loading speed, and sitemaps to improve organic ranking. Besides, it helps to build a better user experience for usability and enables search engines to crawl and index your website. Discover the best technical SEO tools to enhance your website's performance and increase your online visibility.

So to enhance the technical aspects of your website using Yoast SEO, you can either refer to the Yoast SEO tutorial or know Yoast technical SEO checklist as follows:

Audit your domain for issues
Improve website speed
Look at the crawl ability checklist, like creating XML sitemap, URL structure, pagination, using robots.txt., etc
Look at the Indexability checklist, like auditing redirects, fixing HTTP errors, removing duplicate content, etc.
Focus on rendering checklists, like server performance, loading time, page size, etc.
Focus on rankability checklist, like internal and external links, backlink quality, etc.
Find and fix technical errors.

Tips for technical SEO with Yoast SEO

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Use SEO-friendly URLs
Ensure you use HTTP.
Use an easily navigable structure for the website.

What are Advanced Yoast SEO techniques?

The principal advanced settings in Yoast SEO include the following:

Crawl optimization: It is a premium feature in Yoast that enables search engines to crawl and index the significant web pages of your website.
RSS: Rich Site Summary or Simple Syndication involves the latest content, images, links, etc.
Author and date archives: You enable or disable the date and author archives according to their appearance in search results and social media.
Breadcrumbs: The breadcrumbs indicate the web page positions on a website. They act as navigational aid for the users.
Media pages: Media pages in the Yoast create attachment URLs for the media, like images.

You can refer to the Yoast SEO tutorial for the advanced settings and their purpose.

How to optimize WordPress Sites for Mobile Devices with Yoast SEO Plugin?

Better user experience and quality content
Responsive website design using internal links, internal links, etc
Use structured data for search engines to understand your website
Improve the website's loading speed

Conclusion

Yoast SEO is a simple and comprehensive SEO plugin for WordPress with many features and tools that are functional for the search engine optimization process. In this blog, you will observe a complete Yoast SEO tutorial, providing step-by-step instructions for installing and activating the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress. Besides, Yoast SEO provides premium settings for different SEO elements essential for improving the website's high ranking in search engine results.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How to Use Yoast SEO Plugin for Content Optimization?

You can use Yoast SEO for content optimization by entering your content into the real-content analysis space to analyze. The Yoast SEO plugin scans the text for focus keyword density, meta description, title, and heading. After that, it will provide feedback on your content.