In this workshop I went through all the settings to help users make sure they have this powerful WordPress plugin configured correctly. It can be overwhelming and the slightest wrong configuration could easily affect your search results.

1. Yoast SEO
sponsored by

2. Bob Dunn aka BobWP
blogger, educator, podcaster
bobwp.com | @bobwp
WARNING
BobWP does not label himself as an SEO expert.
I’m just a regular guy trying to figure out Google

3. SEOsearch engine optimization

4. SEO is dead

5. the power of SEO
and your efforts

6. Two factors in SEO
On-page factors
This is for the ranking of your website, and includes technical and textual issues
Off-page factors
Relevant sites linking to you

7. 3 Stages of SEO

8. Crawlability
quixapp.com

9. Findability
This includes sitemaps, related posts, breadcrumbs

10. Content
Optimization

12. installing

22. Settings:
General

27. if you have your site already verified, leave these empty

30. Titles & Meta

31. enable force rewrites

32. Remember, these are the templates. Create titles and descriptions in the event you leave those
pages empty, don’t leave you sitename empty. If you leave meta empty better to be empty than
repeat of all meta desc.

33. Those variables are in place so that there's always a meta description. A text description is always
preferred since that will always be more personal and to the point. Variables can only do so much; they're
automated, so they make less sense most of the time.

34. Titles
Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag, or as many
characters as will fit into a 512-pixel display. If you keep your titles under 55
characters, you can expect at least 95% of your titles to display properly

35. Meta Description
Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally
truncate snippets longer than 160 characters. It is best to keep meta
descriptions between 150 and 160 characters.

39. Post Types:
The common post types
are pages and posts. But
additional post types will
be added depending on
different plugins that you
add to your site

41. Taxonomies:
This is a basic way to group
things together. Examples of
this is categories and tags.

43. Archives:
The most common example
of an archive page is your
blog page. But in this case
you are looking at specific
Author and Date archives.

47. Social

49. make sure add open graph checked… will give FB and pinterest the info needed to share you content

56. XML Sitemaps

57. An XML sitemap is a
document that helps
Google and other major
search engines better
understand your website
while crawling it.

58. lower the entries if you are having server memory issues

64. Advanced

65. Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across
the top your WordPress page, often below title bars
or headers. They provide links back to each
previous page the user navigated through to get to
the current page or uses hierarchical site structures.
Breadcrumbs

68. These help seo robots discover other related content on your site

71. Permalinks
Settings > Permalinks

75. - RSD third party - leave checked if you use remote publishing services
- WLM if you don’t use Windows live writer you can check
- Shortlinks… if you don’t use them, check that box

76. Gives you site attribution if scrapers are pulling your RSS on their blogs

77. Tools

86. Search Console

91. Giving the Google Juice to
Your Posts and Pages
the Yoast way

92. Posts and page should be no less than
300 words.

93. keywords

94. keywords and key phrases
isn’t always just a single word

95. long tail keywords
these are more specific and less common
niche focus

96. Easier to rank
More regular visitors and conversions

97. You want to repeat it enough,
but not stuff them.
Use synonyms

98. and if you are writing something that doesn’t
fit your strategy, exactly
you still want to rank to use terms which
remotely relate to you terms

99. Doing keyword research takes some time and work

100. 1
What is your mission?
What is your website about?
What makes it special?
What promise do you make?

101. 2
Making a list of keywords
Think about your mission, your niche
and your unique sellng points.

102. 3
Construct landing pages
Create incredible landing pages for keywords
you want to be found

103. tools
Google Keyword Planner
Find new and unique related keywords
but don’t get overwhelmed with the
number.

104. tools
Yoast Suggest
This tool from Yoast uses the Google
Suggest functionality you know from
searching in Google. This is a great way
to find long tail keywords.

105. tools
Google Trends
Lets you compare traffic for a set of keywords.
You will also see geographical difference and this
is ideal if your keywords are seasonal, for
instance, holidays.

106. tools
Your Internal Search Engine
What people are looking for on your site.
You will be able to see keywords people used to
find you and the results. Google Analytics by Yoast
is a great way to make this easier to see.

112. As you type in, this gives you suggestions from google.

114. Use your focus keyword here and make sure it entices people to click through
when they find this in their search results.

126. Cornerstone Articles
Think of 4 pages that you would like
someone to read that tells them
about your company or site.
The homepage should link to these.

127. Cornerstone Articles
Minimum of 1-2
Maximum of 8-10

128. Cornerstone Articles
They should be:
Pages, not posts
Update them regularly
And they should be informative

129. Yoast SEO
Premium
Check out this plugin here. It’s my affiliate link so I make a few bucks :)

130. Support
PREMIUM

133. and a redirect manager

137. See next slide for definitions

138. Redirect 301 - Moved Permanently
Use the redirect 301 for pages you want to redirect forever. You can use this for old urls which are not there anymore.
The old url is going to be removed from the index in search engines. Depends which one. If you want it to redirect to a
different page: yes, this can definitely be done, if needed. Try to make the old page redirect to a new page that's as
relevant to the old page as possible.
Redirect 302 - Found
The redirect 302 is useful when you would like to temporary redirect to another page. You are telling the search engine
that the page still exists and should be indexed, but the visitor should be redirected to another page for now.
Redirect 307 - Temporary redirect
The redirect 307 is useful when you would like to redirect for a short time of period. The most important thing is that
the specific page is coming online soon again.
410 Content Deleted
This serve sa 410 error instead of a 404 to whomever tries to visit the page. Whether that's also a different page
depends on your theme and install. A 410 can be important to let Google know that the page isn't just broken, but
completely gone and that you know it's gone.

140. More Premium
Plugin from
Yoast

141. Local SEO
Want to make sure your company website ranks high in Google in your local
community?
Want to be found by patients or customers in your neighborhood?
And: want to improve the usability of your site by easily adding your location
and opening hours to your website?
Check out this plugin here. It’s my affiliate link so I make a few bucks :)

160. Video SEO
for WordPress
Recently, Google removed, without any warning, the video snippets in the search results show up in the video search results.
This plugin still heavily enhances the experience of sharing posts with video in them on social networks like Facebook, Twitter
and Pinterest; allows you to make videos responsive through enabling fitvids.js. It does, however, mean that the direct traffic
impact from Google will be less for our users and that we should focus more on the social sharing aspect.
Check out this plugin here. It’s my affiliate link so I make a few bucks :)

168. WooCommerce
Yoast SEOCheck out this plugin here. It’s my affiliate link so I make a few bucks :)
It will enhance the OpenGraph and Twitter Card enhancements you’re familiar with and love in our SEO plugin, allowing you to register
Product cards on Twitter.
It’ll exclude unnecessary things from the sitemap and makes sure the things that do need to get in the sitemap will be in there.
It adds the option to use the breadcrumbs from the Yoast SEO plugin, which are far more configurable than the WooCommerce SEO
breadcrumbs.
It allows you to make sure the WooCommerce content block on the edit page is always above the SEO block of our Yoast SEO plugin.
It’ll greatly improve the sharing experience for social media such as Pinterest.

173. News SEO
Check out this plugin here. It’s my affiliate link so I make a few bucks :)
The News SEO plugin for the WordPress SEO plugin helps you do all the things that
allow you to optimize your site for Google News. It creates XML News Sitemaps,
editors picks RSS feeds and allows for use of the standout tag and the meta
news_keywords tag as well as helping you optimize some of the more advanced
XML News sitemap options like stock tickers.

174. you will have to submit your site first
to Google News

178. And if you are into analytics
Google Analytics by Yoast Premium
Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking

179. A few more tips
and some
final thoughts

180. Yes, fresh content and
changes are good.

181. don’t go crazy with categories and tags
use tags as least a couple of times
8-10 categories are a good number

182. Help google
understand the
structure of your site by
linking to related pages

183. and creating your
navigation wisely

184. Headings are important.

185. People will understand it better
You will get lower bounce rates
They will trust you more
And chance are they will share it more
Quality Content is Important
well written and nicely structured
make sure and check out the SEO Content book!

186. but it’s time to make sure your
site is mobile friendly
responsive design theme
mobile plugin
(jetpack, wptouch)

187. sponsored by
bobwp.com