How to use WordPress SEO by Yoast

SEO is essential for getting more exposure for any blog or website in the search engine results. The reason for this is that most new visitors first arrive at a website through the search engine results, so what you need to achieve is to have your website appear in the first page of the search results when people search for keywords relating to your blog. WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most popular of all plugins available for the popular WordPress platform, and you can use it to quickly and easily edit SEO-related content without getting involved in any coding or other difficult procedures. This guide takes a look at how to get the most out of the plugin to help increase your blog’s exposure.

1. In your administrator dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New, search for “Yoast” and install and activate the first plugin to appear in the search results.
2. Locate the new SEO section on the administrator dashboard sidebar. Here you can configure various features of the plugin, although for now, we will leave these settings at their default values. The default settings should be adequate for most situations.
3. Create or edit a new post or page. Additional functionality installed by the plugin will appear in a new section entitled “WordPress SEO by Yoast” below the text editor.
4. The Snippet Preview shows you exactly what your website will look like in the search engine results. This will include the page title, link and a description of the page. When creating a new page or post, you initially won’t see any description, and the title will be that of the blog itself. The title will change as soon as you save the post or page into whichever title you enter into the title field. Ensure that the contents of the page or post is complete before proceeding.
5. Enter the keyword (preferably a long-tail keyword consisting of three to five words) which you want to target into the Focus Keyword field. You can get great keyword ideas for your website by using the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool or something similar.
6. Enter the title of your post in the SEO Title field. For the most part, this can be the same as the title of your post. However, feel free to vary it a little while ensuring that it still contains your targeted keyword. This title will appear in the search engine results at the top of your listing.
7. Enter a description of your post in the Meta Description field. This should briefly describe the content in no more than 156 characters, and it should also contain your targeted keyword.
8. Open the Page Analysis tab to see an overview of your post. This will show you where and how often the keyword appears in your content. Ideally, it should occur once in the page title, URL, meta description, article heading and two or three times in the content itself.