Yoast SEO Tutorial | For Beginners (Set Up With WordPress in 20 Minutes!)

what's up guys my name is Dale from creator pro website and in this video I'm gonna show you a complete Yoast SEO tutorial so what we're gonna be covering in this video is number one what is your SEO number two how to set it up and number three an example of how to optimize a post on your website to be most Google friendly and hopefully help your website rank higher in search also if you're completely new to search engine optimization and you want to break down of it I've got a video called what is SEO that I will link in the description so feel free to check that out okay so let's get started number one what is yo se o Yoast SEO is a powerful plug-in that will help you optimize your website to be more easily recognized by search engines like Google Bing or Yandex and ideally help your site appear higher in search results these search engines have powerful algorithms that analyze your titles keywords descriptions and even your URL structure to help you rank for specific search terms so it helps to have a powerful tool like Yoast SEO that makes it easy to manage your titles and meta descriptions set up targeted keywords and even give you a readability score on your writing with suggestions for improvement which will help you make your content stand out more to Google as well as make it more reader friendly okay so now that you know what Yoast SEO is let me show you how to set it up okay first thing that you're gonna want to do is get into your WordPress dashboard and this is actually the dashboard for my girlfriend's blog and she's a complete newbie to making websites as well as blogging so I figured this would be the perfect website to use to show you how to optimize posts step-by-step from start to finish because she's written about a dozen posts that have all yet to be optimized by Yoast SEO so first thing that we're gonna do is get Yoast so I'm gonna go over to plugins and then go over to add new cool and then over here on the right you'll see the search bar and just type in Yoast SEO and then hit enter and then right here you'll see the Yoast SEO plug-in which has over five million installations so you know that it's super legit it's got five stars so it's just an awesome plugin so I'm gonna click on Install Now cool and then just click activate cool so from here you can just scroll down and find it here at the bottom or if you go over to your left hand menu you'll see SEO right here with a little Y for Yoast and then we'll just click on general cool so now we're in the general settings for Yoast SEO and it's going to give you this first-time configuration which I highly recommend doing so I'm just going to click on the configuration wizard button and then this whole process is going to ask you a bunch of questions to get you set up with the best settings so it's just going to ask you if your site is live or if it's still under construction and hasn't been posted yet in this case her site is already live so I'm gonna click on option a and then click Next and then it's gonna ask you what the website is all about it's gonna give you a bunch of options but this one is a blog so I'm going to click on a blog and then click on next okay and then it's going to ask you if you are an organization or an individual person and if you are an organization you can type in your name here so I'll just say the nurse Journal and then you can choose your company logo by selecting choose an image and then I'm just gonna go to upload files select files and then I'm going to select the inertia journal logo that I have here on my desktop and then open and then select choose an image there we go and then you can put in all of your social media URLs if you have those so then I'm just going to click on next and then it will ask you what you actually want to display in search engines whenever you come up in search results so in this case yes I want my posts to display and then I also want my pages to display and I'm just gonna uncheck the my templates I'm just gonna say no for that as well as in my library I don't really have anything valuable for people in either one of those categories so I'm just gonna uncheck them and then I'll just click on next and then it's gonna ask if you have multiple authors for this website and I have no selected because I just have the one author but it's okay to put yes but just keep in mind that when you have multiple people adding content to your website you could confuse Google if you end up with duplicate content so they're just giving you a little warning about that but to make things easy I'm just gonna select no and then click on next okay then it's gonna ask you to put in your website name and mine's already in there it's called the nurse Journal and then it's gonna ask you to select a title separator and I'll show you what this is so if I just go up to Google and I'm just gonna type in any keyword I'll just do nursing to stick to the whole theme here if what we're doing with this blog and if you scroll down as you can see there's like this straight up and down line between the title and the subtitle that's what the title separator is so there's another line here the line seems to be a very popular choice if I scroll down so Wikipedia uses a - there's really no wrong way to go this one's two lines actually so there's really no wrong way to go you can do any one of these but I am just going to go with the popular choice which is the straight up and down line with my website create a pro website com I actually use a - but again there's no wrong way to go so I'm just gonna select next and then it's gonna ask you if you want to sign up for their newsletter you can do that by clicking on the sign up button which gives you a bunch of cool tips on how to optimize your website further there are so many topics on SEO you can almost never stop learning with SEO so I do recommend doing that but in this case I've already done this previously so I'm just gonna click on next and then it's gonna give you a bunch of tutorials that you can watch but in this case I'm not gonna do that right now so I'm going to click on next and then cool we've got a success message so I'm just gonna click on it close okay so we're back to our general Yoast SEO settings and there's really nothing in here in our dashboard so I'm just gonna cover these tabs so first we go to features you can and they or disabled all of these features which my recommendation is just to not touch them I just leave them all on and just let Yoast do its thing so I'm just going to go up to webmaster tools and then here is where you'll be able to verify your site with all the different search engines so you can see we've got four of them here and Google is the most important it's the biggest one so I'm gonna do that one right now so in order to verify with Google we need to use the Google search console but instead of actually clicking on this button what I'm gonna do is just go up to Google and I'm just going to type in Google Webmaster Tools and then enter and then it's this first one right here that says Google webmasters resources to track website I'm just gonna select that and then go to search console and then I'm just going to click on start now and then it's gonna ask me to sign in so I'm just going to select my email and then sign in cool and then from here I'm just going to select URL prefix and then I'm just gonna put in that URL so I'm gonna go over to the nurse Journal dashboard and I'm gonna go up to the top here and just grab that URL without all the extra stuff behind it and then go back to the Google search console and I'm just going to paste that in right here and then just click on continue okay so now we're going to verify our ownership so it's gonna ask you if you want to download this file but my personal opinion it's the easiest way to verify your site it's just to click on HTML tag right here in the other verification methods and then I'm just going to copy this meta tag right here and then I'm going to go back to my dashboard for my webmaster tools in WordPress and I'm just going to paste that in the Google verification code section and then just click on Save Changes cool so now that that's done we're gonna go back to the Google search console and I'm just going to click on verify for the HTML tag cool ownership verified so now I'm just going to click go to property cool so now we're inside our dashboard for Google search console and here's where you're going to be able to see a bunch of analytics on how your site is performing on Google and how it's showing up in search results and you can also fix indexing errors and all sorts of stuff in here but you really don't need to worry about any of that because we're gonna be doing everything through WordPress and I don't have any analytics here yet because we just signed up for this ok so now I'm going to show you how to optimize your blog posts using Yoast SEO so writing a bunch of helpful posts for your website is a great way to help you show up in Google because Google wants to display websites that provide really valuable content for certain niches so in this case the niche is nursing for this blog so what I'm gonna do is just go over to posts and here you can see all the blog posts that she's written and none of these have been optimized yet and you can actually see that if you go over here to the readability score this is with Yoast so you can see that none of these are green and I'll talk more about that later so I'm just going to select one of her blog posts and show you how to optimize it so I'm gonna go with this one which is nursing school which one is right for you and then here you can see the full blog post that she's written and you don't need to be a professional writer or a professional at WordPress in order to get started with writing blog posts you can really just open them up in a Word document like this and just start writing all of your advice and your thoughts on a certain niche and then you can just copy everything over into the WordPress editor and then you can format it like that so anyway I'm gonna scroll down and there is a Yoast SEO section at the bottom here so I'm just going to open that up and then here you can see there is a preview of how your blog post is going to look if it were to be displayed on Google so we've got a few errors with this one so you can see we've got a title separator here and then the exact same separator here it doesn't look great not bad but it doesn't look great and then there's also no Meta Description so it just says please provide a Meta Description yada yada yada but before we work on this the number one thing that we need to determine is our key phrase this is extremely important so this key phrase is what somebody would type into Google and the new ideally want your blog post to show up when somebody types that in so in this case I would want this blog post to show up for nursing school and then if you need help determining which key phrase is to go for which ones are being searched the most on Google you can just go up to Google and I will show you a little trick so I'm just gonna type in nursing school into Google and then as you can see I've got a plug-in over here on the right for Google Chrome and this plug-in is called keywords everywhere and what it does is it tells me how much this term is searched every month so up here it says 74,000 times in a month which is quite a bit so this is a good one to go for but that also means that the competition could be high and then it will tell me it related keywords like best nursing schools get searched 8,000 times in a month so this is a really helpful free plugin and you can get it by just going into Google and typing in keywords everywhere and it should be the very first link and then you can just install it for Chrome which you can see it right up here so that was just a helpful little tip so I'm just gonna go back and if you want to know more about focus keywords you can just click on the little question mark here and that will bring you to a Yoast SEO article that will answer a bunch of questions for you okay so now I'm going to work on this title here so I'm gonna get rid of this separator and put in a different one so I'm gonna go up to the top and I'm just going to grab this one and put in something like a dash that way when we go down that is more how it's going to look so nursing school which one is right for you and it's by the nurse Journal and we can further edit this by just clicking on the edit snippet button and this will show you how it's going to be displayed so its title then page then separator then site title and if you'd like to change the order of this all you have to do is just delete them and then you can just click on insert snippet variable and put them in correct order starting from first to last but I'm gonna leave it the way that it is and then I'm gonna go down and here's where we want to put in a meta description so this is really important Google is gonna read this and look for that exact same Focus key phrase in there so you want to work this key phrase into your meta description somehow so in this case if I go over to excerpt right here she already has one written so choosing the best nursing school to fit your needs as scary and challenging so in this article I cover several factors to help you decide so I'm going to copy that and just put that as the meta description because I want that to show up in Google right here so as you can see it's already highlighted nursing school which is our key phrase so that's really important so just a one to two-sentence Meta Description is perfect and make sure that it contains the key word okay so I'm just gonna click on update just to save my work cool so I'm gonna move down and we're gonna go to SEO analysis right here and open that up and here is your readability score so it's gonna give you problems as well as things that you're doing well and then it will also give you some orange ones that just need general improvement so I'm going to go through some of these problems and show you how to fix them so first we've got internal links and it says that no internal links appear on this page so basically it's saying it wants me to link to different blog posts that are also on the nurse journal com so it wants me to put more of that in this article because it is really good when your articles I'll jump to one another that way somebody will stay on your site longer which will look good to Google so I'm gonna work that in right now so in this case she talked about the NCLEX which is an exam so let's see right here so something about passing the NCLEX so NCLEX is like a nursing exam so what I'm gonna do is highlight that and then I'm going to click link and then I'm going to put in a link to another article so I am just going to go back to posts and then she's got an article here called nourishing school how to pass the NCLEX so I'm going to select that and then over here underneath preview underneath permalink you'll see the entire URL so I'm just going to grab that and click copy and make sure not to include that little button and then I'm gonna go back and paste that in here and then just click on enter or apply so there we go so now if somebody clicks on that it will go to that article so now if I scroll all the way down again that internal links problem is now gone so as you can see it's in the good results section and you can add more if you've got a lot more blog posts so now we've got the key phrase is missing in the introduction so the key word nursing school is not showing up in the first paragraph and it is right here but this is actually a heading so what it means is this text right here so what I'm going to do is reword this first sentence so it says with all the options available today it can be daunting to try to pick schools to apply to so I should say it can be daunting to pick a nursing school like that and now if we scroll all the way down that is now in the green section key phrase and introduction so cool we solved that one okay so next we've got key phrase in the subheadings so this basically means that we're not using the key word enough in these subheadings so this is a subheading right here this is one so these are actually h2 it doesn't matter which one that you choose just as long as these are subheadings so you want to naturally work that a key word in there wherever you can without going too crazy with it because you don't want every single one to say the exact same key word it's just not gonna look like it's very good writing so for here I can work it in so what does it take to get in to nursing school easy enough and then you'll want to do it to at least one more so I can just do nursing school location and size so those were fairly natural and you can work it in anywhere else you see fit but that should be enough to get that to go away which it did cool and then the last of our problems is that we don't have any images that appear in this blog post and images are great because they help separate all of your content and make it easier to absorb so what I'm going to do is put some images on there and then they're going to need some alt text so I'm just gonna put an image let's say underneath here so what I'm gonna do is just select this one spot and then I'm gonna go to add and then I'm going to go to image and then I'm going to go to media library and I'm just going to grab the image that I want to put in and then click select and then here is my image so now what you can do is add some alt text to basically tell Google what this image is about and Google will actually read that so what I'm gonna do is just type in nursing school online versus in person because this is kind of a pros and cons list for the too cool so now if I just scroll down that problem is now gone and now we've got all good results and ideally you'd want to add more images in here which she actually did and I removed them for the sake of showing you how to solve these issues so I will have to put those back for her so now here's a few other tips that could help you with SEO so if I scroll down you will see there's a button here that says cornerstone content if you have an article that is your main article and you want it to be basically your star article then you would want to check this on because I'll show you if I go to create Pro website comm and I scroll down I have a how to create a website article that's actually on my home page and it's a huge article and it is my star articles so this would what this is what I would want to be my cornerstone content so if you have one of those you can check that on otherwise just leave it off and then over here it helps to have a permalink which is a URL that is a close to the keyword as possible so if I don't already have something that is the nurse journal comm slash nursing school then I should make this it like that because that's as close to the key phrase that we want as possible and then I'm going to scroll down and then you can also add categories to it so as you can see we've got four categories here and if you want to add more you can just click add new and this is under the advice category you can add tags so I've got three of them added right now they're not vitally important but it could help so I do recommend doing it and then we can also add a featured image it helps a lot with making the article look better and Google does like images so I'm gonna click set featured image and then I'm just going to grab one so let's just say this one and then I'll click select cool and then I'm just going to go up to update and then preview cool and now here is our finished article that is all SEO friendly and ready to go alright guys so that was a Yoast SEO tutorial for beginners and this is your very first time watching one of my videos then please feel free to check out the rest of my channel I've got tutorials on everything website related I've got tutorials on how to make websites from scratch I've got tutorials on how to make money online and even making ecommerce websites and rumor has it for every new subscriber that I get a baby giraffe is born on the African savannah so do it for the baby giraffes guys alright I will see you on the next video [Music]

Channel: Create a Pro Website

Views: 97,395

Keywords: yoast seo tutorial, yoast seo, seo, seo tutorial, yoast tutorial, set up yoast seo with wordpress, yoast seo wordpress, wordpress seo tips, yoast seo sitemap, yoast seo tool, wordpress seo plugin, seo wordpress plugin, how to add seo to wordpress, how to add seo to your website, yoast seo plugin explanation, what is yoast seo

Id: vXiFErUsb0s

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019