Yoast Seo Tutorial 2016 - How To Setup Yoast SEO Plugin - Wordpress SEO By Yoast

Key Takeaways

[Music] Hey guys, my name is Daryl and today I'm going to teach you everything there is to know about the Yoast SEO plug-in for your WordPress website. Now, what is the Yoast SEO plug-in? Well, it helps you optimize your website to get indexed and crawled by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It also tells people what your website is about. Now, let's give you an example. If I go to this website right here, wordpress.com, we can see it has a, you know, description, create your site today, and it has a little brief synopsis of uh what this site is all about. Now, this can all be done with a Yoast SEO plugin. So, let's go ahead and just dive right into this. I'm going to go ahead and go to my dashboard, my WordPress dashboard, and I'm first going to install Yoast SEO plugin. So, I'm going to go to plugins, and you're going to go to add new. and go ahead and type in Yoast. All right. So, this right here is the Yoast SEO plugin. You're just going to go ahead and click on install. So, I'll give you a brief example of that. I'm just going to click on this one. You're going to click on this one. I'm just showing you what it's going to look like. And you'll be brought to this page. You're just going to go ahead and activate the plugin. Okay? And once you've activated it, it'll be under your installed plugins. So go ahead and scroll down right here or find I have so many plugins I Yeah. So mine's way down here. So the Yoast SEO plugin. Now if you notice on the left side right here, right here it says SEO. You can just click on that as well. All right, great. So now we're at our general settings. Now let's go ahead and get started. Now first let's just go ahead and go to your info. So your website name and an alternative name. And this is pretty simple. So, are you a person or a company? I am a person. So, I typed in Daryl Wilson. Okay. And once you're done, click on save changes. This is kind of the easy stuff, you know. So, next, click on our web master tools. So, as you guys can see, I've already submitted my website to being web master tools and Google search console, which used to be called Google web master tools. Now, let's go ahead and show you how to do this. I'm going to click on Google Search Console. All right. Now, you're given these options right here. So, if you haven't reached this page, it's probably because you don't have a Gmail account. So, go ahead and just create a Gmail account really quick and go ahead and recclick that. And you should be brought to this page. Okay. So, I'm going to go ahead and go to my HTML tag. This is the quickest way to do it. And you can just copy this right here. Just copy this and go back and just go ahead and just pop it in and click on save changes. All right, that's it. You're going to do the same thing for being web master tools. I think Alexa now charges, so you might want to double check. And I'm not going to do it for Yandex because I don't know. I just don't want to. So, next I'm going to go ahead and uh uh go to the security. And you want to leave this disabled. So, you don't want other people messing with your content. So, leave this disabled. They kind of, you know, throw options weird. It's like, you know, do you want to jump off a bridge? Click here. You know, it's just like crazy options they offer in this sometimes. I I don't know why. So, we've covered the basics right here. Now, let's go to titles and metas. So, a title separator. So, what is this right here? Well, if I go over here to this uh um search engine right here, you see right here how it says about and there's this dash a dash. This guy right here chose to have a colon. So, go ahead and just put in Oops. I'm going to close this. Go ahead and put in what you would like. I kind of like this right here. So, that's up to you. And next, we're going to go to our homepage. Now, they've changed this in the new uh update. So, let's go ahead and click on editing the front page itself. Okay. So, we're brought to the front page. Now, you can go ahead and uh click on this right here and go ahead and type what you want to be here. Now, this is going to be seen by visitors and it will be seen by Google. So, make sure it's relevant to your website. I cannot stress that enough. So, how to make a WordPress website create your website. I could use other words, however, I chose to just use these ones. And for your metadescription, this is going to be your metad description. So my keyword right here is WordPress website. Now you can test the strength of your word right here under focus keyword. I'm going to type in tamali's. So if I type in tamali's right away, it says, you know, this is not really related to tamali's. Oh, I clicked enter. Sorry. So it's not related to tamali's. So, I'm going to say, you know what, it's related to WordPress website. Right? There you go. So, WordPress websites and just go ahead and uh, you know, edit these to your liking. Um, take the time to really think about it. This is very important. There are options right here. However, I will get to this in a little bit. So, I'm just going to go ahead and just update this. And I think my metatags or my metad description and my SEO title is fine. So, I'm going to click on this right here. this SEO title and right here we have titles and metas. So we're on the titles and meta section. So we did homepage. Now we did post types. Now this is going to look different from what yours. It's going to look something like this right here. It's going to have a bunch of stuff right here. Now for SEO purposes, just delete everything. Only have your title. Now why do I do this? Well, if you go to these other websites over here, are they going to have their page? Are they going to have all this other information? No. You just want visitors to know the title, a brief description, that's it. Don't give them too much information because it'll over it'll over um optimize your site and it it could rank you down. So, just make sure you just have title. And I've talked to a lot of SEO experts and they all recommend to do this. Now, for your metad description template, go ahead and just leave it on excerpt. So, what is excerpt? Well, we can click on this little drop down arrow right here and go to our basic variables. And this right here tells you what these do. So, excerpt, it gives you a brief synopsis of what the page is about. And that's what we want. We want it to have relevant information to the page, but you're more than welcome to put in, you know, the site name or a title. Uh, feel free to do this. However, most SEO experts will tell you just to have excerpts. So, uh I highly recommend to leave it on excerpts. However, you are free to do whatever you like to your website. And do you want this site indexed by search engines? Yes. Yes, you do. Because if you don't, how is it going to get ranked, right? There are some pages that you don't want indexed. However, I will get to that in a little bit, but generally you want these indexed. Now, we want to go ahead and hide the date. We don't like messy stuff. And we want the metab box to show. And this is for posts right here. So for pages, do the same exact thing. Just give them the title. Say excerpt. Just give them a synopsis about what the page is about. The same thing for media. And the same thing for projects and affiliate links. Now, this can get a little tricky and I don't want to go into affiliate links too much, but if you are an affiliates and you're watching this, you should know that you should be cloaking your affiliate links. So, this really wouldn't matter. However, um you can go ahead and just put no index for your affiliate links. If you're cloaking them, you can go ahead and say, "Yeah, sure. Index them. Why not?" You know, they're cloaked anyways. Um for those of you who are affiliates, if you have too many links on your website, it could rank you down. So, that is why people cloak them or do no index. Okay. And I'm going to go ahead and scroll down. And for our post type archives, you can go ahead and leave this blank right here. Uh this is pretty standard settings and yeah go ahead and let it index and click on save changes. Now these are good for SEO. These strategies I'm teaching you are used by top SEO experts. So I am just sort of following what they believe and relaying the message to my viewers. Next under taximonies. Now we don't want this stuff indexed because a lot of this stuff can create duplicate content issues and Yoast knows this already. So they've actually had the settings of no index. So unless you're a very good SEO expert, I would leave these options all as no index. So all these are no index. Uh except for the link categories, which is standard. So make sure your link categories are indexed. Okay. And click on save changes. All right. And for our archives, uh, the same thing. However, make sure this is on no index and don't change this. And if you do change it, you better make sure you're an SEO u your SEO fluent because this can create duplicate content problems. In fact, it even says on this description that it can create duplicate content problems. So, make sure to leave this at no index. And all these settings right here for the database archives, we've already enabled that. And for the meta robots, we want to go ahead and leave that as no index because we don't want to have duplicate content. That does not look good in the result of search engines. And right here for our 404 pages, so if something's not found, it's just going to say page not found, site name, etc. And right here, same exact thing. These are pretty standard settings. Yos has done a good job. So, I would go ahead and leave this unless you want to be creative. Okay. So, I'm going to click on save changes. And lastly, we're about to other. So, for our sitewide meta settings, we want to go ahead and leave these unless you are a uh fluent with JavaScript, you would go ahead and mess with these settings. However, uh for purposes, you want to go and leave these disabled. Now, this right here, so use meta keyword tags. Unfortunately, Google doesn't really use these anymore. So that's why they say I don't know why you want to use these, but sure if you want to. Uh they're they're not indexed by Google. So everyone's like, "Ah, screw it. We don't care anymore." So uh save changes. Everything looks standard. Next, we're going to our social. All right. So right here, go ahead and enter your fage your your your Facebook page URL, your Twitter username, all of your information for your social networks. And a good word of advice, make sure that this is a fan page because is if if this is your private profile, guess what? If somebody shares it, they're going to be brought to a a private profile. They're going to say, "Oh, this sucks, dude. This guy linked me to a private profile. What the hell?" So, make sure this is uh correct. Okay. All right. And once you're uh you know, take take the time to do this. I understand uh I am going a little fast. However, uh you know, it's it'll take a lot of time to to put all these in. So, I think you know how to enter a URL. So, just go to your Facebook, enter URL. There you go. So, next we're going to go to Facebook. Make sure this is all under enabled. It's very good for your header sections. So, make sure leave these all enabled. And um your image URL. So, what image do you want to show when somebody shares it to Facebook? Well, maybe your logo, maybe something that is relevant to your website. So, make sure you upload an image that is relevant to your website, like your logo, because if somebody shares it, they're going to see that image, and you want them to, you know, to show something that's relevant to your website. And this right here is for apps. So, if you are an app developer, you're going to ahead and put in your Facebook app ID right there. However, most of you watching this are probably not Facebook app developers. So, I am going to go ahead and skip that section. Now, for Twitter, same thing. the medical the the um the uh you want and leave that enabled. But for over here we can go ahead and put you know maybe you want a summary with a large image or a summary. So that means if somebody shares it, are they going to see a summary with large image or are they going to have just a summary? Now we are going to change this option on the other section that I said I will get to later. So if you do want to summary with large image, you can go ahead and leave that and I will get to that in a little bit. So, I'm just going to go ahead and leave this under summary. Basically, if somebody shares your website with Twitter, you want that image to show and I will tell you where to put that image. Okay. So, next, Pinterest. Same thing. So, you will have to confirm your Pinterest account and just enter in your uh Pinterest information there. If you're a heavy Pinterest user, uh it's in your profile settings. You just go ahead and copy and paste the information. I don't really use Pinterest too much. I think it's more for like, you know, girls. I I don't know. That's my ex-girlfriend used it. I I I don't know. I don't I don't really use it too much. So, uh lastly, just go ahead and enter your Google+ URL. That's it. And save the changes. Next, we're going to get into something a little bit more complicated, but don't worry, we're going to do this step by step, which is the XML sitemaps. So, this is our XML sitemap. However, I like to use another website to get an XML sitemap. And right here we have our user sitemap, our post types. This is basically saying what do you want indexed in the XML sitemap and you can also exclude posts. So for example, let's just say you're having uh you know a sale and it's only for like a few days. Maybe you don't want that to be indexed by your XML sitemap. But I'm going to go ahead and give you another website where you can just download this really quick and be done with it. And the same thing for taximonies. So, these are all in the site map. So, I'm going to go ahead and just click save changes. And like I said, if you want, you can click on it and get your site your XML sitemap there. But, um, we need to actually have a digital copy. We need to download it. So, I'm going to go ahead and go to another website, and I'll put this in my description. x xmlsitemaps.com. Now, this will create a site app for your websites where we're going to upload it first to our root domain and then we're going to submit it to Google. Okay? So, just stay with me. And right here, go ahead and enter a URL. So, daryilson.com. Now, change frequency. How how often do you want to index it? Well, I'm going to say every month. Yeah. And that's it. And um I'm just going to click on start now. Everything else is ready to go. I'm going to click on start and it's generating the it's the generation is in progress and if you've noticed they've actually seen some of my pages. I don't know if that went really fast but they know what is on my website. Now to download this just click on uh right here file here and there you go. So it's downloaded. Now we need to do to upload this to our root directory. Okay. So go to your website and then go to your c panel. So your website dash c panel. Okay. So stay with me. This is looks complicated. Don't worry. It's a breeze. Go ahead and enter your password for your c panel. All right. And I'm going to go ahead and scroll down over here and go to file manager. and we want to go ahead and have it for um our web routt and go to uh right here. So, make sure it's on your website. I have hundreds of them. So, make sure it's on your web routt and go to go. All right. So, I'm going to go ahead and um find my website right here. You're going to find yours. So, there it is. And you're just going to go ahead and upload this file right here. So that's it. So you can go ahead and click on upload. And guys, make sure it says XML sitemap. If there's any numbers in there, if there's anything at all, take it out. Make sure it's very basic. So right here, I have my site map. That's it. Just going to open it. Right here, it's uploading. I think it's done, right? Yeah. So, it says I think it's done. Yeah, that was fast. So, I'm going to click on go back. And there it is. Sitemap XML. Cool. So, that's it. Now, we want to submit this to Google. So, we want to go to the Google search console now. So, I'm just going to go and enter in Google Search Console and go ahead and click on the first one. See, before it was web master tools and it's still kind of like that, but I I don't know. just just just click on the Google search console and go ahead and find your website. And if you need to create it, you can just go ahead. It'll ask you like um there'll be a little box, you know, just submit your website right there. And we can go ahead and just click on this. Okay. And we're going to go to uh let's see right here. Crawl. I think it's um site maps under crawl. And you can go over here. I've already submitted mine as you can see. So I am just adding in a lot more. So they're saying error error. But uh you're going to go to add test sitemap and then just type in your XML sitemap. XML. Actually, you know what? We're not going to do this. We're going to go back to our uh we need to get the correct address. So if we go over here, uh when I when I clicked on the uh site map over there. So, if you need this, you're going to go to your um XML sitemaps and you can find it here. Click on that. There you go. So, we need to go ahead and make sure that this is the correct address. So, we go back over here and now we can go ahead and submit it. So, just go ahead and click on submit. There you go. Item submitted. Refresh the page. All right. So, it's done. Everything looks pretty good. Um, okay. So, that is how we submitted our site map. If you have any errors, guys, um, feel free to contact Google and there sometimes, guys, things happen, you know. Um, I don't know why, but it's just sometimes that you just get like weird errors like doesn't work or something, but this is not that important, so don't worry. And next, we want to go ahead and go to Well, it is important, but, you know, it's it's not like going to make or break your website, you know. So, uh, we've we've done with this section. and we've submitted our site map. Now, let's go over to the advanced section. All right. So, breadcrumbs. Now, what are breadcrumbs? I will get into this right now. So, let's give you an example of what is a breadcrumb. So, I'm going to go over here to know WP Beginner has them. So, yeah, WP Beginner and um let's see here if we can find anybody with breadcrumbs. Let's see. Maybe these guys have it. No. Here, let's just type in WordPress tutorials WP beginner. Okay. See right here how there's this little arrow? That right there is a breadcrumb. Okay. So, as you can see, other websites just have that dash right here. Same thing. They have breadcrumbs enabled. Now, guys, I want to highly warn everybody. If you are not a developer, don't bother messing with this because it can actually break your theme. So, I don't want to be responsible if your theme breaks. Okay? So, you don't need to have this. It does look kind of cool, but um I'm going to go ahead and give you an example of how to do it, but make sure your website, your theme supports breadcrumbs. Okay. Now, let's go ahead and get started really quick. Uh we can go ahead and scroll down. So if you want to go ahead and first let's leave this disabled and then we can go and say you know what I want to enable these breadcrumbs and we can scroll down and um how to insert breadcrumbs into your theme. Just go and click on that little link and we want to go ahead and copy this piece of code right here. Okay. So go ahead and copy that piece of code. And right here they even tell you so you can put it inside your single PHP and or your page PHP uh just above the page title. Okay. So let's go ahead and go to uh my settings or no it's under appearance I think. Yeah under appearance and go to your editor. All right. Now over here under the templates over here we want to go ahead and put it we can put under uh single page. Is that right? There we go. Okay. And we can go ahead and um we can put it under our before article title. So I'm going to go ahead and put it right there. And then I'm just going to go ahead and put uh update file. All right. And I'm going to go back to my website. All right, cool. You see this little thing right here? So that home there, that thing is now there. So I know it's working. So if I go to my store, see how I have little arrows now, the store. So these are my breadcrumbs and my breadcrumbs are good to go. Now the DV theme supports these guys. So uh be very mindful about breadcrumbs. Okay. Uh yeah, I can't stress that enough. So, I'm just uh throwing that out there. So, let's go ahead and go back over here. And now I'm going to delete the breadcrumbs. So, editor appearance and it was under my single page. Just go ahead ignore all this if you haven't uh messed with it. Um I would contact a developer just to make sure you're doing everything correctly. Oops. Just go ahead and delete all this. Now I mess up the code. Now I have to delete it. Huh. Okay. So, I'm going to go ahead and save this. Now, I'm going to update the file. And if I go back to my websites, it's gone. It is gone. Rest in peace. All right. So, I'm going to go back to my dashboard now. And we're going to keep going down these settings. And um so, click on the SEO right there. Uh following is blocking your XML site maps. I will fix this later. I'll just click on fix this. It's probably because I uploaded so many site maps for these tutorials. So, okay. So, I'm going to go to my advanced section now. And uh we've done the breadcrumbs. So, uh feel free to mess with these settings. However, if you're not a developer, just ignore all this. So, yeah, I'm just going to go and leave these disabled. And now for your permal links, this can also make or break your website. So, be very mindful. Now, this can actually be um for your your cleanup permal links. You can go ahead and put keep and basically let's say you type in your website, right? Like mine is darylwilson.com and then you have a page like store. If I type in something like this and then I press enter, it will actually redirect it back to the store. So, it sort of cleans up these words if somebody types something in wrong. So that is what that is referring to. Um I would go ahead and leave all these standard like I said unless you're a JavaScript developer. So um if you are you probably don't need me to tell you this. So I am going to click on save ch save changes and our RSS feed. Now generally for your RSS feed you want to leave it after. However you can have it before and leave it like that. Now, if you want to go ahead and find your RSS feed, you can just go ahead and type in your website dash feed. And um under all this code right here, it's buried under there. So, you can go ahead and find it somewhere. It's in there somewhere. Yeah, it's in here somewhere. You know, I I I'm not gonna I'm not going to go through this and look. I'm way too lazy. So, I'm going to go ahead and just leave these and save changes. All right. Now, we're going to go to our tools. So, we have this new bulk editor. So, let's go ahead and click on bulk editor under tools. Now, this will allow you to basically um title your pages in bulk for SEO purposes. So, right here, I changed the title to steps to make a new e-commerce website. I spelled it all wrong. So, I'm probably going to want to change that. And over here, um, you you know, about me. So, about me or about me. And you can just go ahead and save that. And, uh, there you go. So, this is for your SEO purposes. Okay. And you can also do this for the description. So, if you want a uh a, um, a meta description, you would put that in there. And I might actually consider buying their pro version because with their pro version, I can delete I can find and delete these broken links because I'm too lazy to go uh on Google search and find all these broken links, but Yoast does it. So, I highly recommend getting the premium plugin once you're comfortable with it. Don't just buy it. Uh you know, look into it, but I know that they will find broken links for you and you can delete them. So, next we have our search console. So, we've already done this basically by um uh what's it called? Putting in our sitemap. But we can go ahead and click on get Google authorization code and just go ahead and allow it. And simple just copy and paste this bad boy in there. And there you go. Authenticate. All right. Done. So, let's just go ahead and skip this section. Now, it looks like we're almost done, guys. So, these are the additional extensions. So, you guys can get the local, the news, how to optimize your videos, and the premium version, which will um delete those links. And that's the only thing I really care about. But, let's go ahead and give you a better example of how to use this plugin. Now, so I've shown you all the options. Now, you see right here how it's oh, it's under like a yellow uh a green. So, basically, it's saying this page is optimized for, you know, what you're talking about. Now, we can go to something like um a themes over here. And right here, I have uh WordPress themes that I recommend. So, let's go ahead and um we can optimize this page now. So, I'm going to click on my edit page. So, best WordPress themes. So, obviously this page is not optimized whatsoever. So, what should I put here? Well, I'm talking about WordPress themes. So, best themes 2016 and then maybe I can talk about the best WordPress themes. Get the best reviews for free updated monthly for your WordPress needs. Now, you see how it's in green right there? So, they're saying, "Okay, cool. you have you have enough content because if you add too much, Google won't actually be able to see that. So, right here, they're saying, you know, um it's okay, but you can do better. So, I can probably write in best free. There you go. And my link right here. So, this is another SEO secrets. Um you want to have it best WordPress theme. So when you create these pages, make sure it's exact. So best WordPress themes, I'm talking about best WordPress themes. Now, if this says something like Page something else, it's not optimized. So when you create these pages, make sure to um change that. Now, another thing I want to talk about is these other options right here. So on every page, you're given these options right here. So for a Facebook title, if somebody shares this page, what do you want them to see? Now, you should have an image right here. So, if somebody shares it, like I said, you want an image, right? And go ahead and give them a brief description about your website. So, when somebody shares it, this information will show up. And for your Facebook title, so I'm going to put learn best WordPress themes 2016. And right here I can talk about you know you know I'm so lazy. So yeah some so the best free and paid WordPress themes of 2016. Get indepth information for your WordPress website. And then I'm probably just going to upload an image of something like a the WordPress logo or something like that. Right. So that makes sense. So next we have um our our um our uh our settings right here. And generally you want these to be follow. So you want these to be indexed by Google. Uh there's very rare circumstances where you would not want your pages to be you know searched by Google. So um unless you're you know SEO fluent, I would just leave these options blank. So for breadcrumbs title, same thing. If you entered in, if you use your breadcrumbs, uh, this is where you would put in your title and your other URL. Um, you can just go ahead and leave this blank because if you leave it blank, it will just give you your default permal link, which is perfectly fine. Okay, so I'm going to click on update. Okay, so it updated. Now, I want to show you guys one more thing uh before I let you go, and that is uh some other settings over here. So, if I click on SEO and I go down to tools, we have uh we can check your SEO scores. You know, it doesn't work for me sometimes. I don't know. You can just click on it and uh if it works for you, you know, cool. Recalculate SEO scores. And yeah, that's all it does for me. So, I guess I guess that it worked, you know. And import and export. So you can import and export your SEO settings. So if you have SEO settings for Yos for another website, you can import it or export it or you can import it from other SEO plugins like all-in-one Woo themes. Uh all these right here. So that is something else to take a look at. I'm going to go back to tools page. And lastly, I want to talk about the robot text file. So I am going to go ahead and click on um the file editor. All right. So this is our robot editor and basic or robot text and this will allow us um to crawl. So we kind of need this right here. So uh we can click on this create robot text file. However, it gives you this file right here and um we can just go ahead and copy this. Okay. And there's other ways to do this. So, if you um well, let's just do it this way first. Let's just go ahead and copy this. And I'll give you another website that will allow you to do this, but I think this is perfectly fine. So, we have this right here. We go ahead and go to Notepad. Make sure you go to Notepad and then just enter in that information. And you want to go ahead and save as. And make sure this says robots text. Just like that. Make sure it's just like that. If there's a one simple, if there's anything at all, make sure it looks just like that. Robot text. Okay. And you are going to say okay. And last thing we're going to do is upload this again to our root domain. So, uh, we want to go to our cPanel. So, darywilson.com, our c panel. And I'm just going to go ahead and put in my password right here. All right. And next, I want to go ahead and scroll down and go to the file manager and the web routt. All right. So, I need to find my website right here. I know it's here somewhere. Okay, there it is. And you're going to upload it here. So, you're going to click on upload and do it the same way. Now, I've done this so many times I have like this is not good. So, uh, I'm going to go ahead and delete that one. You want it to look just like this right here. Robot.ext. Okay. And to do that, just click on upload and upload it here. I I don't want to upload another one. My site is it's been thrashed. So, I I trust that you just choose it and go back and make sure that it's there. Okay. So, that's all I wanted to tell you guys today about the Yoast SEO plugin. It does help for SEO purposes. Now, if you want your website to actually rank and go up, you guys can actually go ahead and purchase one of my um uh what's it called? SEO campaigns or or packages. So, what this does is I outsource all of my work to India. That's why my prices are so dramatically cheaper. And it's way better to do this than to hire a company in United States because they're going to charge you somewhere between, you know, 800 to $5,000 a month. So, uh, go ahead and check this out. You know, you know, browse around, take a look, compare prices. Um, that's all I wanted to say. I hope, uh, this tutorial was very helpful for you guys. Yoast SEO plug-in is recommended by top SEO experts. So, uh, congratulations. And um you have any questions, this was a god- aful tutorial, just tell me in the comment section. Like, dude, this was the worst tutorial ever, dude. Like, you're getting a thumbs down, brother. You know? So, uh that's it. Thanks for watching my tutorial, and I'll see you guys later.