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Yoast SEO
Table of contents
Why SEO, why Yoast?
In short, you “do” SEO to eventually rank higher in Google, but at the same time you also provide a better experience for your visitor. In the end, Google judge your website as if Google is a visitor itself. When visitors indeed click and stay on your page for a longer period of time, Google learns that probably this page is a good hit, so the ranking might go up even further. Also when you would like to do Adwords – now or later on – a good SEO will help your paid position as well, and will help lowering your average cost per paid click. Same goes for social media; when you integrate this well, your SEO will be better as well. So in the end, it all works together.
For SEO we use a tool called Yoast. Yoast is one of the many SEO tools available. The best part about Yoast it’s that it’s integrated in the back end of the website, so you can work with it while maintaining the website. When you edit or create a page, you can see directly how the SEO for that page is doing.
Small disclaimer
Please note that only using this tool isn’t the one and only solution for better ranking. It takes a lot of things to run a website smoothly. You need to keep the website up to date, add fresh and relevant content, and make sure you attract visitors by any channel you want (direct visitors, social media, organic or paid visitors, etc.). You can test certain pages (especially critical ones, like contact page) to see what happens when for example you leave out some distracting text or links. You can set up landing pages (pages specially created for specific goals, like an Adwords campaign, or a page designed to be found on a specific keyword), and do much more. But do it all with proper SEO, or you might blow some opportunities.
General settings for Yoast
The Yoast tool is implemented in the back end of the website. It has a separate menu item on the left panel, called “Yoast SEO”. You will find all general settings for SEO under this subpages, for instance setting up the Organization information, link social profiles and set titels for post types. This means that you will need to edit most of these settings only once, and after that you’ll be fine.
Per page settings
On each page in the admin you will see a Yoast SEO block appear. Here you can edit the SEO settings for that specific page only. There are 4 tabs in the settings with different options.
Tab 1, SEO:
This is the most important tab. Here you can set a Focus Keyphrase that Yoast should use to judge the score of the page. This keyphrase is not visible in the page, but only used by Yoast. When a keyphrase is set up, you will a section ‘Premium SEO Analyses’ containing tips on how your page content and snippets score, based on the focus key phrase. You can use these tips tom improve the content and the snippet.
Tab 1, Section Google Preview
This section shows you how the page can show up in search engines. Based on the search phrase of the visitor the content might differ, but in most cases this content will show up. You can update the SEO title and Meta description of the page. A bar below the field will indicate the optimal length of the content. When this is red, not all content will show up in the search engine results.
Tab 1, Section Advanced
The Advanced tab contains some settings for more expert stuff. You can enter a separate Breadcrumbs title, which will be used in the Breadcrumb in the front-end. You can also add a canonical URL, which is explained later on this page.
Apart form that there are 3 settings on how the page should show up in search engine. You can specify the Allow search engines to show this Page in search results setting, to hide a page from search engines. When this is done you can also specify whether links should be followed or not. Be careful with this settings, as they directly impact the page score for this specific page.
Tab 2, Readability
This is a tool to help you improve your writing, this is only indicative and might not be as accurate, depending on your language. You can look at it, but see it as suggestions.
Tab 3, schema
This a an advanced tab and should only be used when you know what to do. You can specify the page type so search engines know what type of content the page contains. You can find more info on this online.
Tab 4, social
In this tab you will see a preview of the page for different social media. You can update the preview for each social medium. Whenever someone share the link on one of the platforms this information is used.
Featured image
It is best practice to always select a Featured image on a page. Even when the image isn’t displayed anywhere. When a featured image is set, this image is used when the page is shared on social media or in Teams, Slack and other communication channels. When this image is set, you will see the image pre-filled in the Social tab of Yoast SEO.
Canonicals
An HTML tag called a canonical tag (or rel=canonical) enables search engines to distinguish between the “primary” version of a website and pages that are almost identical to it or extremely close to it.
Canonical tags are used in SEO to inform search engines which version of the page you want to show up in search results, to combine link equity from duplicate pages, and to enhance crawling and indexing of your website.
Example: text from a website in another nation that is written in the same language. Use canonical URLs when the content is truly identical, Google prefers to overlook it unless.
Set up a canonical URL
You can set a canonical in the Per Page settings. Go the Yoast SEO block on the page that needs the canonical and open the section Advanced in the SEO Tab. Here you can find the field ‘Canonical URL’. Paste the full URL of the primary page here, to specify that page as the canonical of the current page.
More on SEO
For more information and best practices on SEO, you can find the guide WordPress back end tool – YOAST Best Practice on Sharepoint. The file is referenced WEB-TSG-DM/001.