Yoast SEO - WordPress Tutorial

One of the most popular digital SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast SEO. It's great because it gives you tons of flexibility over your site's content, how you manage your meta descriptions and even build schema and sitemaps. Now, Yoast is really focused on being friendly to beginners, and most of its advanced functionalities are hidden away in a menu. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to install and navigate Yoast SEO. From your WordPress dashboard, I'll choose the plugins on the left hand navigation and click "Add New." In the upper right hand corner, search for Yoast and click "Install Now." Activate the plugin and then let's take a look. Yoast adds a menu option in the bottom left corner, so hover over that and select "General." If Yoast shows a welcome message, you can skip it for now. Now Yoast is free, but they have an SEO premium option that gives you more flexibility, features, and support. For now, you should be good with a free version. The first thing you'll do is set up your configuration. Click the "First time configuration" tab and follow the prompts to give Yoast as much information about your site as possible. I've already filled these out for my site. Once you've finished the configuration, go to your SEO dashboard. From the sidebar, I'll select "Tools." And you can see all the common features that Yoast comes configure with. Some of the most popular options are the Import and Export, file editor, and the bulk editor. Another feature that has made Yoast famous is its data optimization assistant. To find this feature, go to any content page. For example, this page right here. At the bottom, it shows me how to optimize my meta title, meta description, and URL slug are compared to the main keyword. With this feature, you can also manage things like tags, indexing, canonical, and schema. Yoast is one of the most popular plugins for on-page and all-in-one SEO. I recommend using it for content optimization and sitemap management. What I like the most is its solid community of Yoast users. They constantly offer free guides and resources to make the most out of your Yoast plugin. Now you know that Yoast is an excellent plugin that makes WordPress SEO easier. Go ahead and add it to your site and start optimizing your WordPress.