Yoast SEO Tutorial 2022 (STEP-BY-STEP FOR BEGINNERS)

hey there i'm ben from blogwithbin.com and welcome to this updated yoast seo tutorial this video is an in-depth step-by-step walkthrough of how to use and configure the free yoast seo wordpress plugin so you can get more visitors from the search engines while also optimizing your content for seo and overall readability and i've been using the yoast seo plugin since day one of when i started blog with and since then it's not only streamlined a lot of the technical aspects of seo but it's helped me land on the first page of google bing and yahoo search results for specific keywords and keyword phrases the best part about it is that this plugin makes seo easy with just a few clicks of the mouse you can optimize your content for the search engines which can help you start to see a rankings boost in the search results now if you're new to my channel welcome i'm glad you found me here you'll find a full-length step-by-step tutorials on how to build grow and monetize wordpress blogs if you haven't done so already i encourage you to subscribe to the blog within youtube channel that way you could stay up to date with all the videos that come out in the future i also encourage you to subscribe to my mailing list and i'll put a link to that in the show notes below the video that way you can gain access to my free ebook the blog starter kit alright with that being said let's dive in and take a quick look at what you're gonna learn in this video so i've broken this video down into four sections each section will show you how to set up configure and use the plugin to boost your wordpress blog's seo now i should point out that we'll be using the free version of the yoast seo plugin in this video there is a premium version of the plugin that costs around 89 and if you have the budget for it i highly recommend investing in it however i've been using the free version for years and as i mentioned earlier in the intro it's helped me land on the first page of the search results and has taken the guesswork out of the technical aspects of seo which has saved me a ton of time and headaches so with that being said here are the four main topics we're going to cover in this video first i'm going to show you how to configure the plugin by using the yoast seo configuration workout this tool will help ensure that your site has the optimal seo settings in place next you're going to learn how to configure your blog's homepage seo settings as well as your social seo settings this is super beneficial when it comes to people sharing and visiting the most popular page on your blog the home page next you're going to learn how to configure the seo settings for your blogs pages and posts the yoast seo plugin streamlines a ton of the seo features when it comes to optimizing your pages and posts for seo and this part of the tutorial will take you through the process of actually putting the plugin to use within your blog's content and finally we'll walk through some of the additional settings and tips on how you can leverage this powerful plugin to enhance your blog's seo and page rank all right so with that being said let's get started so first things first you'll want to make sure that you have the yoast seo plugin installed and activated on your wordpress site if you don't you can easily find it in your wordpress dashboard by hovering your mouse over plugins and clicking on add new then within that search field in the upper right hand side of the screen simply search for yoast and it should be one of the very first plugins listed but you can install and activate the plugin here if you need to then after you've installed and activated it it's time to configure it so let's head over to the yoast general settings page by hovering your mouse over seo and clicking on general and this will bring you to the settings page and as of december 1st 2021 yoast implemented an update to the plugin that totally changed how you configure it hence it's the reason i created this updated tutorial so what used to be their configuration wizard is now called the configuration workout and you'll see in a few moments they basically simplified the configuration process and removed a handful of steps i'm actually a fan of it and i'm glad they did it because it'll save you some time and help you get your blog up and running a lot faster so without further ado to configure the plugin click the yoast seo configuration workout link and this will bring you to the workout page where you have three options now we're using the free version of the plugin in this tutorial so the first option is all that will be available however if you purchase the premium version of the plugin you'll have a few additional workouts to choose from either way the free version is more than enough to help you optimize your site for the search engines so to get started click the start workout button and as i mentioned earlier yoast simplified the process into five steps and one thing i want to point out before we get started is that if you need some extra guidance with your configuration they've created a help guide that you can access here alright so the first step in the configuration process is to optimize your seo data and this will let the plugin see your site as google does and helps you give you tips on how to improve technical seo issues all running in the background so to start the process click the start seo data optimization button and then depending on how much content you have it may take a few minutes so just be patient and sit tight as the progress bar moves along and it seems to be going pretty fast at the moment and just a few more seconds almost there perfect and then once it's done you'll get a notification letting you know that the data optimization is complete and then you can go ahead and click the continue button to move on to the next step next yoast wants to help you better represent your site on the search engines and if you're unfamiliar with a google knowledge panel here's a quick example of denzel washington's now he's obviously a huge superstar and has a wikipedia page which google is pulling from to use in the knowledge panel but if you don't have a wikipedia page google will pull the information from the yoast seo plugin and present it here when people search for your blog again this is just one of those things that can help you leverage seo to drive traffic to your site so the first question is asking if you're an organization or person if you're running a blog like i am in this video you'll want to switch this to person so from the drop down menu just select person then below that you'll be asked to select the name of the user that's associated with the site so within that drop down select your user profile next is the person logo or avatar and this is like a featured image that will be used within the search results specifically the knowledge panel so click the select image button and upload an image that you want to use i'm just using a placeholder here but i recommend using some sort of branded imagery for your logo slash avatar and there we go the final part of this section we have the site tagline now by default it's using the tagline from your blog but you can change what displays within google's knowledge panel here if you'd like alright moving on so go ahead and click the save and continue button next are the social profiles and this will help the search engine bots know what social networks your blog is associated with again this is important because when the search engines crawl your site and see that you're connected to multiple popular social networks and you have a following it can give you more authority and help to boost your search engine ranking so to let the search engines know about your social profiles you'll need to update your user profile within wordpress and again this is actually handled in your wordpress dashboard so we'll address this in a few minutes after we're done configuring the plugin so let's go ahead and move on to the final two steps of the configuration workout so below that is number four and yoast is asking you for permission to collect certain anonymous information about your site and how you use it so go ahead and say yes or no here and click the save and continue button and then finally they're asking you to sign up to their newsletter now i actually recommend doing this yoast has a ton of helpful content that they send to their subscribers that can help you improve your blog's seo so sign up here if you'd like and then that's pretty much it for the configuration workout so go ahead and click the finish this workout button and then in a few seconds you should get a notification letting you know that you've successfully configured the plugin however you still need to update your social profiles which we're going to do in your wordpress user profile so click the view other seo workouts button and real quick if you're seeing this huge seo issue warning don't freak out this just means that you need to make a quick change within your reading settings and we're going to go through that towards the end of the video all right so like i said we still need to update your social profiles within your wordpress user profile and this will help the search engine bots know what social networks your blog is associated with so first things first hover your mouse over users and click on profile then scroll down to the website section and all you're going to do is enter the url of your blog followed by all of the social networks that you're associated with and simply enter the urls of each one in the fields provided then once you have that all filled out scroll down and don't forget to save your changes by clicking the update profile button and moving on all right the next thing we're going to configure for the plugin is the search appearance of our homepage and what i mean by this is that we're going to edit how the search engines and social media channels display our blog when people either search for it online or share it on social media so on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over seo and click on search appearance and the first two things we can configure are the title separator and the home page and if we take a look at our blog really quick you can see what the seo title and title separator will look like on your home page as you can see it's currently using our site title and then a title separator followed by the tagline best of both worlds this will also be used in the search results as well so if we head back to the yoast search appearance settings you can change what the seo title looks like on your home page tab and the search results within the seo title section now by default yoast is using what they call variables but you can easily delete these out and simply type in what you want the title and title separator to be then below that is the meta description this is a brief description that's going to be shown in the search results that you can edit within this text box here as well and when creating your meta description try to use keywords that you're wanting to rank for and try to keep it within 155 characters all right moving on to the social settings this is where you can modify the image title and description used when someone links to your homepage and shares it via social media the process to update this is very similar to your homepage seo settings by default the social title is using your site title but you could always remove the site title variable like so and then simply type in your desired site title and tagline as well as the social description then i saved uploading the image for the last step because i'm going to be using the same image for the social and knowledge graph images so all we're going to do here is add the social image and logo to these two sections to help enhance our food blog's search appearance what this is doing is it's basically telling the search engines to use these images we're about to upload whenever your blog's homepage is shared on social media and when your knowledge profile is displayed within the google search results having a professional image to represent your site on social and the search results is a best practice but it's also great for brand recognition and brand loyalty and if you don't have an image you can easily create one on canva.com and i'll put a link to that in the show notes and speaking of creating your image here's a list of the recommended image sizes for instagram facebook twitter and linkedin and they have the image dimensions listed out based off of what type of image you're using and where you're using it however for this example we're going to be using a landscape image that's 1200 by 630 pixels this is the recommended image size for a landscape image on facebook but it will fit nicely with most social media channels and then i'm going to spare you having to sit through the entire process of me creating this image but as you can see i've used canva.com to create the image and i'm using 1200 by 630 pixels for the dimensions but the image is basically mimicking the logo of this particular blog and i'm obviously speeding through this part of the video but you get the idea canva is super easy to use then back at the blog under the social settings section click the select image button and then we're going to be uploading the image that we just created so within the media library click the upload files link and then click the select files button and then find the image that you want to use then once you have the image don't forget to update the alt text and title within the attachment details this is a best practice and good for seo as well then click the select button and we now have a beautiful social image that will be displayed across all social networks when our homepage is shared next let's do the same thing for the knowledge graph so follow the same steps to add the image and then we're just using the exact same image that we just uploaded and there we go looks great and don't forget to save your changes and our settings have been saved i know these things may seem trivial and somewhat tedious but they can go a long way when it comes to your seo and brand recognition all right moving on next i'm going to show you how to configure the yoast seo settings for your blogs pages and posts so for this example i'm going to be configuring the yoast seo settings for my about page however please note that the steps we're about to cover can be used for your blog's posts as well these are essentially the same steps but like i said we'll be configuring the seo settings for my about page so first things first let's access the back end of that particular page so go to your pages management menu within your wordpress dashboard and then i'm going to edit the about page then once you're in the wordpress editor you can begin to configure the yoast plugin settings for the page content and i should point out that this is a demo blog that i've already added some placeholder content to but you'll want to be sure and configure your yoast page and post settings after you've created your content i always create my blog posts and pages first then i configure the yoast seo settings before i publish them that's just my recommended process for using the plugin and then to access the plugin if you scroll down to the bottom of the page within the wordpress editor you'll see the yoast settings if you've installed and activated that plugin you can also access the yoast seo settings in the upper right hand side of the screen here as well both will help you optimize your pages and posts for the search engines okay so the yoast seo plugin is a powerful tool it should be used every time you create a page or post on your blog if you look towards the top of the plugin you'll see some of the features available like setting your focus keyword creating your google snippet schema and social settings as well as a readability analysis which we'll cover in a few moments okay so now that you have a brief overview of the plugin let's take a closer look at how to use it so the first thing that you can do is set your focus keyword or key phrase this is where you can tell yoast the keyword or key phrase that you're trying to rank for and once you've set your keyword the plugin analyzes the content determine whether or not you're using that focus keyword in a way that benefits your seo plus after adding the keyword you'll be given an seo grade that helps you optimize your content for the search engines below that is the google snippet editor and this is where you can configure how the search engines see your google snippet and the cool thing about this is that google gives you a mobile and desktop preview of what that snippet will look like as you edit it and you can toggle between the two previews here but again this is super helpful when it comes to optimizing your snippet for the search engines then below the preview is where you can edit the snippet and first is the seo title now by default yoast starts you off with what is called snippet variables of the title and the page dash separator followed by the site title and you can easily add or remove the variables or you can remove them completely and just type out your seo title and one thing i want to point out is that this is only changing how your title looks in the search engines not the actual title on your page or blog post now you'll also probably notice the orange line moving below your text as you type and this feature helps you stay within the character limit set forth by google and other search engines and lets you know when you should stop adding content to the snippet by turning green next is the slug and the slug is just your permalink so whatever comes after the dot com of your page will show up here below that is the meta description and this is the preview text that people see when they search for your blog post on a search engine so to change it within the meta description box simply start typing a preview of your post you'll want to be sure to use keywords and make it enticing to help improve your click-through rate and you'll probably notice the orange line moving below your text as you type this is the same feature as the seo title field and it helps you stay within the character limit set forth by google and other search engines and also lets you know when you should stop adding content to the snippet by turning green and there we go then below that we have the seo analysis and once you've entered your focus keyword the seo analysis checks the presence of your focus keyphrase or keywords throughout the content of your page the plugin will then reward you with a colored bullet based off of its findings and tell you what is good and what needs to be worked on now yo states that when you follow the instructions and craft your pages and posts so that they get green bullets they have a better chance of ranking higher on the search results however you don't need a green bullet every time so don't stress too much if it's not green next we have the cornerstone content feature this is a new feature of the plugin that lets you mark the most important and extensive articles or pages on your blog this is important because it's telling the search engines which places of content are the most important and providing the correct internal link structure between your posts and pages tells google which content is the most important and has a positive impact on your ranking so if this page is a cornerstone piece which it is go ahead and flip the switch to mark it as a cornerstone piece of content next there are some advanced settings where you could tell the search engines not to show this page in the search results you could set the meta robots breadcrumb titles and canonical url but for this tutorial we aren't going to worry about those features so you can go ahead and skip those next if we close this and then scroll up and click on the readability tab this will show you the readability analysis and this uses an algorithm to determine how readable your page or post is and yoast has carefully crafted this algorithm to make it as accurate as possible without being too strict it features several checks that'll give you advice when to write your post in other words by following the advice you can make your text easier to read and understand which is good for the overall user experience and seo now you'll probably notice that yoast gives you a score on your readability and seo analysis resulting in a colored smiley face red is bad green is good and i'm using dummy text in the post so it obviously isn't going to be good however should all of your bullets be green well yoast says no not every bullet and smiley face should be green but you should aim for a green happy bullet overall having an orange bullet for one of the checks is okay your article will still be able to rank even if it doesn't pass all the tests this is merely an indication not a necessity next we have the schema tab and this is a somewhat advanced and technical aspect of of seo but schema is markup and it's found at schema.org and it's a form of microdata and once added to a web page schema markup creates an enhanced description which appears in search results and top search engines like google yahoo and bing all collaborated to create schema.org back in 2011. so it is important to your seo but yoast does a lot of the heavy lifting for you so i recommend leaving these alone for now but you have the option to configure them if you'd like and last but not least we have the social tab and this allows you to fill out the social data for the page this means that you could tell social media channels like facebook and twitter what to show whenever you share this page on their platform you can add a social description title and an image here as well again for the sake of time i'm skipping past this but if you know you're going to be sharing these pages in posts across facebook and twitter then it makes sense to update this social data here okay so that's yoast seo plugin in a nutshell but one final thing i want to point out is that within the page settings on the right hand side of the screen you'll see that the yoast seo tab gives you a quick snapshot of the readability and seo analysis of the page just a heads up on that alright so after you've configured the yoast seo settings for your content within the page you'll want to be sure and click the update button this will ensure that your changes are published and saved all right moving on to the final portion of the tutorial where we're going to cover some of the additional features of the plugin as well as tips to help boost your blog's seo and page rank okay so the first thing i want to show you are some of the additional settings you can configure with the plugin so let's head to the general settings page real quick and then you'll see that each section has various tabs or additional settings and features that you can configure within the plugin now by default the yoast seo plugin sets them up for you after you install the plugin and i must say that the default settings are fairly strong as is so i personally don't mess with them too much but it's nice to know where they are and what they can do so let's quickly go over them okay first let's take a look at the features tab and this is basically home base for the majority of the yoast plug-in features you can able and disable them below by flipping the switches on and off and then if you want more information about what they do click on the circle question mark for more info now again i recommend leaving them as is and you'll see that you can't even access all the features if you're using the free version however let me show you a cool tip so one really neat thing you can do here is you can generate and access your xml sitemap and if you're unfamiliar with what that is it's basically an easy way for you to inform search engines about pages on your site that are available for crawling a site map is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell google and other search engines about the organization of your site's content search engine web crawlers like googlebot read this file to crawl your blog bottom line having a sitemap is good for seo so to view your sitemap just make sure the sitemap lever is switched to on and it is then click on the little question mark icon and then click on the c the xml sitemap link and this will take you to your sitemap now it doesn't look like much but trust me this is very important to your blog this is also what you'll submit to all the major search engines in order for your blog to be properly indexed all in all the fact that yoast takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting and automatically creates an xml sitemap for you is super cool and is one of those things that it does in the background that can have a major impact on your blog's seo all right moving on next we have integrations and this is where you can integrate the yoast seo plugin with third party products if you're using them then the final tab of the general section is webmaster tools and this is where you can use the boxes below to verify with the different webmaster tools like google and bing and if you're unfamiliar with verification it's basically the process of proving that you own the web property and once verified search engines like google will grant you access to sensitive google search data for the site which can affect your site's presence and behavior on google search and other google properties so yoast gives you the ability to verify your site through the plugin simply follow the links to the different webmaster tools and look for instructions for the verification method to get the verification code however if your site is already verified you can just forget about these if you aren't verified with google and you don't feel comfortable using the plugin i have a step-by-step tutorial that's on my youtube channel that walks you through the process of getting verified by google i'll put a link to that in the show notes as well all right moving on to the search appearance settings so hover your mouse over seo and click on search appearance in your wordpress dashboard then if you look towards the top of the screen you'll see that this section has additional tabs as well there are content types media taxonomy archives breadcrumbs and rss again each tab contains various settings that you can configure to enhance your seo so let's take a look at the content types tab and this gives you the ability to specify what the default search appearance should be for any type of content you have you can choose which content types appear in search results and what their default description should be and by default they mean that this will be used if you don't configure the yoast seo settings for a particular page or post and as you can see you can change the default seo settings for your posts if you scroll down you can see you could change it for your pages and this blog is using the easy index plugin so i have indexes and i can edit them here as well and you're probably noticing that you have to pay for the premium version of the plugin in order to unlock the social settings for your content either way this is where you can specify the default search appearance for your blog's content and if you haven't done so already i recommend that you at least add a meta description for each content type all right moving on to media and this is basically for whenever you upload media like an image or a video to your wordpress site so whenever you upload media to your wordpress site it doesn't just save the media wordpress creates an attachment url for it so you're basically creating additional empty pages on your site that can potentially have a negative impact on seo so if you never use those attachment urls it's better to disable them which is the default setting of the plugin so you're good to go there moving on to taxonomies and these are things like your categories tags in post formats and this is where you can configure the seo settings for each taxonomy again the yoast default settings are pretty good but i recommend at least adding a meta description for each one here as well next we have the archives and yoast states that if you're running a one author blog the author archive page will be exactly like your home page and this is what's called duplicate content which is not good for seo and if this is the case on your site you can choose to either disable it which makes it redirect to the home page or add no index no follow to it so it doesn't show up in the search results either way yoast turns your author archives off by default which will help you avoid duplicate content issues then there are also some settings for your date archives and special pages like your 404 page but i recommend leaving the default settings in place next are the breadcrumb settings and if you're unfamiliar with what breadcrumbs are they're basically a secondary navigation system that shows a user's location on a site and they look like this on the wordpress theme kale which is what i'm using in this video and you can add breadcrumbs to each page in post by adding the yoast breadcrumb block at the top of your content within the wordpress editor then within the yoast breadcrumb settings you can get specific on how you want them to display on your site i could sometimes get confusing if you're new to the topic so i recommend checking out this link here where yoast has created a helpful article on how to implement yoast seo breadcrumbs and they also have a great video that walks you through the implementation process as well alright moving on next we have the rss settings and this feature is used to automatically add content to your rss feed more specifically it's meant to add links back to your blog and your blog posts this helps search engines identify you as the original source of content now unless you know what you're doing i just recommend leaving this as is all right moving right along to the social settings and this is where you can configure some of the seo settings for the social networks that you're associated with okay so starting with facebook yoast gives you the ability to enable or disable the open graph metadata and add a default image that's used anytime someone shares your site on facebook next we have twitter and here you can configure the card metadata and card type used on twitter and this is how twitter will display a preview with an image and text excerpt when a link of your site is shared on twitter and finally there's pinterest and the plugin allows you to confirm your site with your pinterest account just follow the steps outlined in this link and add the meta tag in the field below all right the last feature of the plugin that we're going to cover are the tools and these built-in tools allow you to do some pretty advanced things like import and export your yoast seo settings to another blog there's also a file editor that allows you to quickly change important files for your seo you have a bulk editor where you can quickly change titles and descriptions for your posts and pages without having to go into the editor for each page and then the optimize seo data tool i recommend doing this if you haven't done it already it takes a few minutes but it can help speed up your site and give you insight into your internal linking structure now you can activate the data tool here or you should be able to do it via your general settings dashboard of the yoast seo plugin now i obviously already activated the data tool before i created this tutorial so i can't show you how it's done but just reach out in the comments if you need some help using the tool or click this link to learn more about the benefits of using it okay there are two more sections of the plugin premium and workouts these are geared towards selling you the premium version of the yoast seo plugin if you have the budget for it and like i said i highly recommend the premium version but if your budget's tight the free version can have a very positive impact on your blog's seo and page rank okay so there's one final tip i want to go over before we close out if you recall after we went through the yoast configuration workout we got this warning about a huge seo issue now if you're not seeing this then you could skip this part of the tutorial but if you are seeing this then you'll need to make one small change to ensure that your site is indexed by the search engines so within your wordpress dashboard hover your mouse over settings and click on reading then towards the bottom of the screen there next to the search engine visibility section simply uncheck that box so that you won't discourage search engines from indexing your site and then don't forget to click the save changes button and your settings have been saved all right and then let's head back to the general dashboard really quick and all in all i know seo can be tricky to learn whenever you're just starting out but the yoast seo plugin helps simplify a lot of the technical aspects of seo and can teach you a lot in the process i've learned a ton just by using the plugin and as always if you get stuck yoast has some great help documentation that you can access by clicking on the question mark icon within your dashboard and as you can see they offer a ton of free resources to help you make sense of seo so that's going to do it for this video if you found it helpful i'd greatly appreciate it if you would like comment share and subscribe to the blog have been youtube channel also now that you've started your blog check out these two videos on email marketing and blog monetization they'll help you grow your audience and earn a passive income with your blog and as always your support means a great deal to me and my family and for that i thank you so with that being said i'll see you in the next video and thanks for watching

Channel: Blog With Ben

Views: 70,487

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Id: -HiQpdbteWU

Length: 36min 41sec (2201 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021