If you have a WordPress website and you know what SEO means, then you probably already have the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin installed. But not everyone takes full advantage of its features. In this article, we'll cover the 10 most important Yoast SEO features and how to use them for your own WordPress site.
Generate XML sitemaps Proper organization is essential for SEO, and an integral part of that is XML sitemaps. Once installed, Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap and continuously updates it as you create new content. You can easily change the XML settings via SEO > XML Sitemaps in the WordPress admin dashboard.
Automatically submit XML sitemaps to Google or other search engines
Yoast SEO, also known as ping, automatically sends updated sitemaps to Google and Bing. you can also submit XML sitemaps to the Baidu Webmaster platform. The purpose of this is to help search engines add new content quickly and keep it up to date as you change other indexed content. Under the XML sitemap option, you can also choose to have it ping Yahoo and Ask.com, etc. each time you publish new content. Allows you to create custom meta titles/descriptions Often, a title that provides the perfect email subject line for your subscription is a bad title for SEO. Using Yoast's plugin, you can write two headers, one for visitors and one for search engines. You should also add custom meta descriptions to your content. Not only will this help target the right keywords, but you can also handcraft incredibly enticing descriptions that will get more people to actually choose your page when viewing the search results. You can access both directly in the SEO box under the general post/page editor.
Check Focus Keywords
You can easily and quickly check if your keyword density is too low or excessive, or check for other factors that alert you to the need to fix your page/post URL/slug, and other things that affect your on-page SEO. This may be a good overall reminder for you to keep track of after posting. All you need to do is enter your focus keyword in the general SEO box under the post/page WYSIWYG editor and see what alerts pop up below it.
Lets you easily add page redirects
If you're updating posts or content pages on your site, but your old site is still getting the most traffic, it may be a good idea to add a simple redirect to the new version. This can indirectly help your SEO by providing visitors with more up-to-date/better/clearer information, which may lead to more shares and general user engagement.
Lets you add breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs visually show the organization of the site, as well as the specific area of the site you are currently visiting. We use breadcrumbs at WP Webmaster, so you can see an example of how it works by scrolling to the top of this post. (Or take a look at the example below, taken from a post on this blog.) Breadcrumbs not only help your visitors navigate your site, but they also help Google (and other search engines) determine if/how your site is relevant to a specific topic or keyword. You can enable breadcrumbs under the internal links option. While you are free to make edits, it is usually a good idea to keep it nice and simple so that people and robots can understand it.
Allows you to change the permalink
Under the permalink option, you can access a number of different features that are very useful for the right site. You can manage the URL or slug of a post or page here. redirect overly long URLs to clear the permalink.
This feature helps to compensate for minor incorrect links from other sites or your own pages to your page. If someone accidentally enters a number or something too much at the end of the page URL, it will automatically redirect back to the clean/correct URL. (Example: http://website.com/page2/291 -> http://website.com/page2) Important: If you use any type of e-commerce plugin, or Track sales sources by using ad series tags in URLs, then you should not activate this feature no matter how many ugly links you find to your page. Automatic removal of deactivated words from Slug
As the name implies, this feature removes deactivated words from the slug. This basically means that deactivated words (which Google suggests because they don't provide any meaning) are automatically removed even if you don't enter a specific slug for each post. Since it's easy to forget little things like this, it's useful to keep them active. Helps you edit titles/descriptions in bulk Assuming Yoast SEO was enabled later and many of your popular posts and pages were created before you installed the plugin and don't have a specific SEO title or description, is there nothing you can do? I mean, it's just too time consuming to go in and edit a page and page/post, right? Thankfully, the plugin provides a bulk title editor and a bulk description editor. Enabling you to easily bulk edit titles and descriptions of old posts and pages. Of course, if you have a backlog of content, trying to do this for every piece of content could turn into a full-time job for three people, so fixing only high-priority pages is a good idea. Help you "hide" specific posts/pages from search engines
While you are obviously not interested in hiding your entire website from search engines (after all, you are reading an article about using SEO plugins), sometimes you may want to hide certain pages from search engines. Let's say you offer a special promotion to your email subscribers and you set up a quick page with more details, which is not the page you want Google to show in its search results. Thankfully, with Yoast SEO, you can easily choose to hide any post or page from the WYSIWYG editor of said post or page. Simply go to Advanced Options and change "Meta Robots Index" to "noindex" as shown in the image below. Now, only people with direct links will be able to find your page about special subscriber deals, as long as the robots do what they are told. Bonus tip: If you are the primary administrator of a site with many contributors, you may want to disable the advanced options for other authors/administrators. Otherwise, you could be putting yourself at risk of someone redirecting some key pages to a site of their own choosing, or maliciously turning your maximum hits on Google into noindex. Wrap-up While we've covered 10 useful things Yoast SEO can do for you, it's worth noting that we've still only scratched the surface. If you're still a little new to SEO for WordPress sites, or just a little overwhelmed by the terminology, you can check out our Yoast SEO tutorial.