Configuring Yoast SEO

To get the best website ranking, many experts in search engine optimization recommend using the Yoast WordPress Plugin. The good news is that this plugin handles much of the details needed for on-page SEO, especially in an evolving Panda environment. You definitely want to avoid the “Gary Coleman” duplicate pages syndrome, which can greatly reduce the effectiveness of your online presence.

Dan Shure, provides an excellent tutorial and step-by-step methodology for configuring the Yoast plugin, partially excerpted below:

Titles & Descriptions

Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive – so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don’t forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the ‘sitename’ variable – this is the site title under settings>general

Indexation

This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.

Please note: Want to reiterate – this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup – one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.

Also – if your blog has already existed for some time, and you’ve been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn’t just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.

I like letting users browse posts in the dated archives

Not best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page – but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

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