How to Use Yoast SEO for WordPress

Yoast SEO is one of the most powerful tools for optimizing WordPress websites. Whether you’re new to SEO or looking to refine your strategy, this guide walks you through everything you need to know to set up and use Yoast properly.

What is Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) plugin for WordPress. It helps you optimize your site so search engines categorize it properly. Using smart SEO helps improve your search ranking so more people visit your site. 

There are two versions to Yoast SEO: a free version and a premium version. There are also several premium extensions that extend the tool’s functionality. 

How to Install Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is installed and activated like any other WordPress plugin.

To install the free version, visit Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Type “Yoast SEO” into the search bar. The plugin will appear at the top of the list. 

Click the Install Now button. Once it installs, click Activate.

Yoast SEO Setup

After installing the plugin, you’ll have the option of running the first-time configuration tool. I strongly recommend doing this. Click the Start First-Time Configuration button. 

If you left the page, you can jump into the configuration tool by visiting Yoast SEO > General and click the First-time Configuration link. 

The Yoast SEO configuration consists of five steps. Let’s walk through each of them.

Step 1: SEO Data Optimization

In the first step, Yoast needs to analyze your site as if it were a search engine. The goal is to detect any technical issues that need addressing. This does not change any content or settings on your site. 

Click on Start SEO Data Optimization.

When the optimization is complete, you’ll see this message:

Please note: The duration of the optimization varies based on the size of your site. 

Click Continue to move to the next step.

Step 2. Site Representation

In this step, you’ll add information about your site. This information will help Yoast SEO generate structured data.

First, tell Yoast SEO if the site represents a person or an organization. Then submit the site’s name, the organizations’ name, and a logo. 

Click Save and Continue to move to the next step.

Step 3: Social Profiles

Here you can connect your social media accounts. Facebook and X (Twitter) are the default options. Click Add Another Profile to add more accounts. 

Click Save and Continue to move to the next step.

Step 4: Personal Preferences

In this step, decide whether you want to receive emails from Yoast SEO with tips, guidance, and product information. If so, enter your email address. Then select whether you’d like to share data with Yoast SEO to help them improve their plugin. 

Click Save and Continue to move to the next step.

Step 5: Finish Configuration

You’ve finished the setup process! You can click the button to learn more about Yoast SEO or head to your SEO dashboard. 

Yoast SEO Settings

Before you start optimizing pages, let’s go through Yoast’s settings. It’s a big plugin with lots of options, so it’s worth your time to understand them. 

Navigate to Yoast SEO > Settings. All of the important SEO tools are enabled by default, but you may decide to enable more based on your specific needs. 

General > Site Features

On this page, you can see all of the features that come with Yoast SEO. Some are active already. Some need to be activated if you think you need them. 

Writing Features

• SEO analysis: Suggestions to improve the findability of your text and make sure that your content meets best practices.
• Readability analysis: Suggestions to improve the structure and style of your text.
• Inclusive language analysis: Suggestions to write more inclusive copy, so more people will be able to relate to your content.
• Yoast AI: Content optimization suggestions that you can apply as you wish.
• Insights: Get information into what you’re writing. 

Site Structure

• Cornerstone content: Make sure your most important articles get the attention they deserve. 
• Text link counter: Count the number of internal links from and to your posts.
• Internal linking suggestions: Linking suggestions for relevant posts and pages. (Only available in Premium.)

Social Sharing

• Open Graph data: Allows for Facebook and other social media to display a preview with images and a text excerpt. 
• X card data: Allows X to display a preview with images and a text excerpt.
• Slack sharing: Adds an author byline and reading time estimate to shares in Slack.

Tools

• Admin bar menu: The Yoast icon in the admin bar gives you quick access to Yoast’s SEO dashboard. 

API

• REST API endpoint: All the metadata you need for a specific URL.
• XML sitemaps: Enable sitemaps to make sure search engines can find and crawl them.
• IndexNow: Automatically ping search engines whenever you publish, update, or delete a post.

General > Basic Sites

This page sets some basic information for your website. If you didn’t run the first-time configuration, you’ll need to enter your site’s name and logo. You should also submit an alternative name (such as an abbreviation) and a tagline.

Next, choose a title separator. This is simply the symbol that will appear between elements in your SEO titles. For instance, if you choose a hyphen in your title, your pages and posts will look like this by default:

Page Title – Site Name

The Restrict advanced settings for authors option allows you to choose whether all users can access the Advanced and Schema section of the Yoast SEO sidebar or metabox. Disabling this allows access to all users.

General > Site Representation

The information you submit on this page will be used to appear in Google’s Knowledge Graph. These are the same settings that we selected during the initial configuration, but if you skipped that step, complete them here. 

General > Site Connections

Boost Yoast SEO’s performance by connecting other tools, such as Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. Click the individual links to get verification codes from each service. 

Content Types

In these sections, you can change the search appearance, social media appearance, and schema of each type of content. (You can always customize the settings for individual pages and posts in the Yoast SEO sidebar or metabox).

Categories & Tags

This section is similar to the Content Types section. Customize how you want category and tag archive pages to appear to search engines and social media platforms.

Advanced > Crawl Optimization

On this page, you can prevent search engines from crawling elements of your website that they don’t need to. By default, Yoast SEO hides most of these elements from crawlers, but you can re-enable them by clicking the X toggle. 

Advanced > Breadcrumbs

A breadcrumb is a small text path that indicates where the user is on the site. It helps them navigate your site and its structure. On this page, you can configure the appearance and behavior of your breadcrumbs. 

Advanced > Author Archives

If you have more than one author publishing to your site, you might decide to use author archive pages. Here you can enable or disable them and decide how they appear in search. 

Advanced > Date archives

Date archives are collections based on publication dates. These don’t offer much SEO value and they could create duplicate content problems. We recommend you to disable date archives.

Advanced > Format archives

Format archives are collections of content organized by formats, such as image archives, link archives, and quote archives. Users rarely browse these because the content in them don’t relate to each other. They can also cause duplicate content issues, so we recommend disabling them. 

Advanced > Special pages

Special pages refer to your search results pages and your 404 page. Customize how their titles appear in search. 

Advanced > Media pages

By default, Yoast SEO deactivates media pages (a dedicated page for each image) because they are unnecessary and can confuse search engines. If you decide you want them, this page is where you enable them and customize how they appear in search. 

Advanced > RSS

This allows you to edit the RSS feed. You can add your own content to put before or after each post in the feed. Use the variables provided to customize your content. 

The Yoast SEO Dashboard

Now that you’ve set up Yoast SEO, it’s time to check out your new SEO dashboard. 

Yoast’s dashboard gives you a high-level overview of your site’s SEO. It identifies any problems with your site and your individual pages and posts. Navigate to Yoast SEO > General to find this page. 
In the example below, there’s one page that has an orange light. Clicking the View button will take you to pages that need improvement. You can also sort by content type and category.

Integrations

Yoast SEO can integrate with other products to improve your website. For instance, the SEMRush integration can help you perform keyword research without leaving the post you’re working on. The WP Recipe Maker integration works with Yoast SEO’s Schema API to get rich snippets for your recipes.

Tools

Yoast SEO comes with some helpful tools to get more value from the plugin: 

• Import and export SEO data from other plugins (if you’re changing to Yoast from something else, like Rank Math or All in One SEO). 
• Bulk edit titles and descriptions without going into each editor. 
• Run the SEO data optimization process to improve how your data is stored. 

Academy

The Academy is full of valuable courses you can take to learn practical knowledge and tips about SEO. Some of the topics are quite complex, but they’re worth your time if you care about your site’s rankings. 

Upgrades

In the Upgrades section, you can purchase extensions that make Yoast SEO more powerful. For instance, the Local SEO extension adds key optimizations for local businesses. The News SEO extension optimizes your site for Google News and adds all the necessary schema markup. 

Workouts (Premium)

Workouts are step-by-step instructions to improve your site and pages. You should regularly go through each workout to identify optimization opportunities.

In The Cornerstone Approach workout, Yoast walks you through the process of selecting cornerstone content articles. Then it has you find other relevant articles and create links back to your cornerstone pieces. 

Redirects (Premium)

A redirect is a way to send users and search engines from one URL to another. It’s often used when you’ve moved a page, changed a URL, or want to consolidate multiple pages into one. 

Redirects help maintain your site’s SEO performance by preserving rankings, minimizing link loss, and helping search engines understand the changes. Proper use (like 301 redirects for permanent moves) create a smooth transition without damaging your visibility.

You can create redirects using the Yoast SEO meta box or sidebar in the page/post editor or do them on the Redirects page. Simply choose your type of redirect and insert the old and new URLs.

How to Optimize Pages and Posts with Yoast

Now that Yoast SEO is set up on your WordPress site, your next step is to optimize some pages and posts. 

When you enter the editor for a page or post (or any custom post types that you’ve enabled Yoast SEO on), you’ll find two new tools: the meta box at the bottom of the post editor and the sidebar on the right side. 

Personally, I prefer to use the sidebar because it leaves the pages content open and is always available when I scroll. But you can use whichever you prefer. They both affect the page in the same way. 

There are four components to the post optimizer. Yoast SEO uses a light system to show you whether your content is optimized. 

• A green light means that your content meets the SEO criteria set by Yoast. It has a higher chance of ranking well in search results. 
• An orange light is a warning sign that means your content needs work. You should review and improve the highlighted elements. 
• A red light means you have critical issues that must be addressed. These problems can prevent your content from performing well.

Let’s go through each component to help you understand how to optimize a post.

1. SEO Tab

This is where you improve the content of your past for search engines. 

Focus Keyword

The focus keyword or keyphrase is the term you want a page or post to rank for. It can be multiple words strung together. Yoast needs this term in order to measure the rest of your page’s optimization. 

Enter the term you want to target. If you have a SEMRush account, you can use the Get Related Phrases button to get more ideas. 

Please note the focus keyword is only for internal use. It’s not used by search engines. Search engines do not rely on the data we enter into SEO plugins. They use their own algorithms to determine which pages meet the search intent of a given query.

Search Appearance

This section gives you a preview of how the site will appear in search engine results in desktop and mobile views. There are three fields you can adjust. 

1. SEO title: In this field, you can either a) write your own unique title or b) use variables to let Yoast SEO build a title from what it knows about your site. In the example below, Yoast is using page title, separator character (that we designated in the settings), and the site title. You can also use a combination of text and variables. 

2. Slug: This is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page on your website. It comes at the end of the URL after the backslash. Choose this field wisely. If you change it at a later date, your page will lose all of its SEO value. You’ll have to redirect to a new page to prevent broken link.

3. Meta description: This should be a brief description of the page. If you leave it blank, search engines will use something from the page as descriptive text, but it may not be what you intend. (In fact, according to a study by Ahrefs, Google rewrites meta descriptions in 62.78% of cases.)

Yoast SEO wants you to use the focus keyword in all three of those elements. If you don’t, it will take points off your SEO analysis. 

Furthermore, Yoast will warn you if your title, slug, or description are too short or too long. Here’s what that look s like. 

SEO Analysis

The SEO Analysis is a checklist of your page’s SEO performance. Yoast will tell you what you did well and where you need improvement. 

For example, the analysis checks that your focus keyword is present in your SEO title, meta description, and image ALT attributes. The plugin also checks if you’ve used the same keyword on other pages (because you don’t want multiple pages targeting the same phrase). 

In the example below, the page is mostly well optimized, but there are a few errors to address. The keyword does not appear at the beginning of the article, it does not appear enough times in the content or subheadings, and it does not appear at the beginning of the SEO title. 

Notice the colored light system present here as well. Green means you’ve done well. Orange means you need work. Red indicates critical errors. 

Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content refers to the most important pieces of content on your site. These are your primary articles that you link to often. You can designate a page as a cornerstone by simply switching the toggle.

You can see your cornerstone pages in the post list by selecting the Cornerstone Content link. 

This list gives you an easy way to sort your cornerstone pieces so you can focus on improving them. If you have Yoast SEO Premium, the link suggestion feature will give priority to these articles to make sure you’re always linking back to them. 

Advanced

In some cases, you may want to exclude specific content from search engine indexing.

You might want to stop a page from being indexed by search engines if it’s a temporary or unfinished page, contains sensitive information or duplicate content, or if it’s an internal page only (like an admin panel). 

All you have to do is select No under Allow search engines to show this content in search results?

In this section, you can also:

• Use advanced settings for meta robots. For instance, you might instruct search engines to crawl the content, but not the images. 
• Change the title of breadcrumbs (as long as you have activated them first).
• Set a canonical url.

2. Readability Tab

In the Readability card, Yoast SEO uses an algorithm to discover if the text is easy to understand by readers. Then it offers suggestions to improve any issues it finds. 

You can score a high readability score by doing the following:

• Using subheadings to break up sections.
• Using active voice throughout most of your content.
• Using transition words like “because” and “therefore” to link sentences. 
• Creating sentences and paragraphs that aren’t too long. 
• Avoiding sentences that start with the same word.

This is another use of the colored light system. In this example, the post is fairly easy to read, but it needs some slight improvements.

3. Schema Tab

Webpage schema is a set of tags that help search engines learn about your website. Search engine crawlers read the scheme markup on a page to understand the page’s content and display it properly to searchers. 

In some cases, your schema markup is shown to searchers in the form of short answers, rich snippets, product previews, events, places, local maps, and more.

By default, Yoast SEO automatically describes your pages with WebPage and your posts with Article schema. You can change these defaults in Yoast’s settings. 

You can also decide how Yoast describes your content on each individual post or page with the Schema tab. For instance, if you were creating a contact page, you would change the Page Type to Contact Page. 

4. Social Tab

In the social tab, you can adjust how your page appears when shared on Facebook and X (Twitter). Yoast will use your featured image and page/post title by default, but you can change these to whatever you like. 

Yoast SEO Premium

Yoast SEO Premium is the paid version that offers advanced features to take your site optimization to the next level. Here’s what you get with the premium version:

• Optimize your content for up to five keywords or phrases. This increases your chances of ranking for more search terms.
• Get smart suggestions for linking to related posts. This improves your site’s structure and SEO.
• Create and manage 301 redirects to preserve your SEO value when you change URLs or delete pages.
• Content insights tell you which words you use most often in your post so you can make sure they align with your key focus.
• See how your content will appear on Facebook and X (Twitter) before sharing.

Is Yoast SEO Premium Worth It?

If you’re serious about improving your site’s SEO and want access to advanced tools, Yoast SEO Premium is worth the investment. It’s especially valuable for larger websites, ecommerce stores, or blogs that rely on organic traffic. 

For smaller or personal sites, the free version is usually sufficient. Ultimately, it depends on your needs and goals.

Yoast SEO Plugin FAQs

Take Control of Your SEO

Yoast SEO simplifies search engine optimization by making it accessible and effective for WordPress users. By following this guide, you’ll be well-equipped to improve your site’s rankings, drive traffic, and create a better experience for your audience.