How to Set Up Yoast SEO for WordPress

Yoast SEO is a tool to help you optimize your website. It’s a WordPress plug-in that I recommend all my blog writing clients use. It saves you so much time optimizing your web pages and blogs. Yoast is an easy tool to use and since it’s free (!!!) you might as well take advantage of it! This blog will go over how to set up Yoast SEO for WordPress so you can start optimizing your website today!

What is Yoast?

Before we learn how to set up Yoast SEO for WordPress, let’s chat about how it can help you optimize your website for SEO. It allows you to choose a focus keyword for the page and then analyzes how well you optimize for that keyword. The checklist includes:

• Keyword distribution across the page
• Keyword placement in headings
• Keyword in the SEO title
• Keyword in the meta description
• Meta description length
• SEO title length
• Did you include at least one outbound link?
• Did you include at least one internal link?
• Do you have an image?
  • Does the alt text contain the keyword?
• Keyword in the introduction
• Keyword density
• Has this keyword been used before?
• Keyword in the URL slug
• Text length

Whew! I know that’s a lot. This is everything it takes to optimize a page well, so having this tool to check all these things for you is a game-changer. Imagine checking all these things yourself! 😅

Yoast scores how well you hit each point on the page. The analysis will give you a green score for things you’ve done well. Orange means it’s okay, but could be improved. Red means it needs your attention. Then, you receive an overall score of green, orange, and red to tell you how well the page as a whole is optimized.

It all relates back to the focus keyword you choose. However, identifying the focus keyword is only for the analysis. It doesn’t tell search engines that’s the keyword you’re trying to target. It’s only used to help you optimize the page for that keyword. If you get a green score for the page, you have a well-optimized page for your chosen keyword.

Free vs. Premium

Yoast has a free version, which is what I use. It gives me plenty to work with to optimize my pages well. 

One of my clients has the premium version of Yoast. It costs $99/year and gives you extra SEO checks. It includes internal linking tools to easily identify related content on other pages and internal linking opportunities. It also has some AI features (and you know how I feel about AI…)

How to Set Up Yoast SEO for WordPress

Setting up Yoast SEO for WordPress is pretty easy, actually! I’ll go over the exact steps you need to do it. Remember, you need a WordPress or Shopify website to use Yoast. It’s not available in Squarespace or Wix (yet!)

1. Install the Plug-in

Here are the steps to set up Yoast:

• Log in to your WordPress dashboard
• On the left side, navigate to “Plugins” > “Add New”
• Search for “Yoast SEO” in the search bar
• Click “Install Now” next to the Yoast SEO plugin
• After installation, don’t forget to click “Activate”

*NOTE: I came across this while activating Yoast for my website. Some WordPress subscriptions come with preset plug-ins and don’t allow you to install new ones. Yoast should be an option already, but I wanted you to be aware that if you don’t see an option to add a new plug-in, that could be why.

2. Configure Your Settings

Once the Yoast plug-in is installed, it will appear as a navigation option on the left side of your WordPress screen. Go into your settings. You’ll want to enable these features:

• SEO analysis
• Readability analysis
• Insights
• Cornerstone content
• Text link counter
• Admin bar menu
• REST API endpoint
• XML sitemaps

You can play with the other settings and change things to your preference. I added some of my brand information!

Using Yoast

Now it’s time to optimize your pages! The Yoast plug-in will appear at the bottom of the page you select. Identify your focus keyword and follow the recommendations from the Yoast analysis to optimize the page. 

Don’t forget to check for updates to the plug-in. Updates make sure the plug-in is operating correctly and giving you the most up-to-date SEO recommendations. SEO algorithms change all the time!

I hope this article taught you the impact Yoast can have on your website! It will help you optimize your web pages to the best of your ability without doing a ton of manual work. It’s free, so you might as well use it! 

I recommend all my clients install Yoast if they’re using WordPress. If you’re wanting to invest in blog writing to boost your SEO even more, contact me! I’d love to chat with you about how we can improve your website traffic, domain authority, and quality lead generation.