Learn YOAST SEO in 20 Minutes - WordPress SEO Tutorial for Beginners 2021!

Hey guys, this is Hogan and in this video, I'm going to show you how to use the Yoast SEO plugin So for those of you who are unfamiliar with Yoast SEO It's essentially a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your website's on-page SEO So it's a must-have plugin for anyone using WordPress because on-page SEO is an important factor When you want to rank keywords in the search engines So for example when Google actually scans your website, they want to find keywords titles descriptions Your url structure. They want your keywords to actually appear on the website And that way they can determine whether or not your web page is actually relevant to what the user is actually searching for So Yoast SEO will actually help you by providing a live checklist that you can actually go through Which ensures that the best practices are followed for each of your pages and your post So in this video i'm going to be showing you a real example of how I do it from installing the plugin And setting it up and also optimizing a post So if you want to learn like keyword research on-page SEO and also off-page SEO I have a full SEO tutorial which i'll link down below in the description. So without much further ado, let's get started So log in to your WordPress account and log in to your dashboard section So we want to first install the plugin. So hover over plugins and click on add new And here on the right you want to search for Yoast and then click on enter Okay, it should be the first result here called Yoast SEO with over 5 million active installations And as you can see, it's a really popular and really good plugin. So we're going to click on install now And activate the plugin Okay, so here is your Yoast SEO on the left so you can click on general So if it's your first time, uh using the Yoast SEO, you can actually click on configuration wizard So i'm going to go through this with you. So click on that Okay, click on configure And here okay. So what you choose here is if your website is live and ready to be indexed So basically you're ready to have google scan your website and actually index your pages on The google search then click on option a if it's under construction still Um, then you can select this one here. Okay, so if you actually finish building your website, then you probably need to Um turn on and make sure that it is set to this one here. Okay, click on next This one is a sort of a blog and a website. So i'm just going to select blog And then click on next i'm gonna select company name of company. I'm just gonna put my name And here you can insert a company logo by choosing image I'm gonna just click on next So here you can enter in your facebook Uh page or your instagram url your twitter url you can put this all here Okay, so i'm not going to be walking through that that's pretty easy to do. So click on next So here, uh, you want to make sure that you allow the search engines to Index your posts and pages. So those are the most important and if you've actually got like woocommerce installed You want to make sure that the products are also Uh selected on yes, but sometimes depending on your theme you might have like different Sections like for this theme you have layouts as well because we can actually import demo layouts And I actually don't want that to show in the search engine Okay, so I don't want that to show the layout parts, but you want to make sure your pages posts and products are definitely Um selected on yes click on next So here i'm going to choose no Okay, so this is best to choose no because you want to prevent your author archives from actually showing and if it actually shows that it might actually have duplicate content issues, so Duplicate content means like you've got the same content and that way google doesn't actually know You know which page to actually rank and sometimes that causes issues What I recommend is selecting no and then click on next So here you want to connect it to the google search console. Okay. So here it's a must-have tool for your website Um, it shows the health of your website, but also it shows Like what keywords people are actually searching For when they actually click on your website, so it gives you some data and you want to connect that to your website So what you can do is uh, go to google and maybe type in google Search console and hit on enter So if you don't have an account, you probably need to create an account and you can click on start now And i've already got an account, but you might need to fill in some basic information And once you've actually done that then you can actually add in a property Okay, so This is the new layout. Okay, click on the left here Okay, I think you can close that click on that add property Okay, you want to select the second one url prefix? Right and you want to grab your url? Okay from the top and paste that in And then click on continue So once you've actually done that then you actually need to Verify the ownership of it. So right now what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on done for now And we're going to configure it later because we need to set this up first So we're going to click on get authorization code and we need to actually log in to our accounts Click on allow Okay, we're going to click the code here And paste it into here click on authenticate Okay, so it's going to connect the yoast seo to your google search console and we want to select the profile So we want to add in the one that we just created. Okay inspire demo dot site And then click on next Here is your title settings. So you want to put in a website name? This could be probably your brand name. Okay, so name of brand I would say like name of brand And your title separator this basically is this thing here, okay So as you can see, this is the title and then you've got the separator. Um, this separator is just a line So it really depends on what you want to show you can pick this one if you want to And click on next So here you can sign up for the newsletter if you want to but i'm just going to click on next And you can also upgrade to yoast premium. They've also got some seo training, but i'm going to click on next Okay, so now that we've configured it we want to close Okay, so that's going to take us here again. Uh, what you want to do is click on webmaster tools And we want to get the google verification code So we want to go back here Okay, and click here Let's look for our new property, which is not verified which should be on the bottom Click on it Now what you want to do is you want to click on the html tag option? And then just uh select all of it Right click and copy that to your clipboard Go back to your website and paste in the code here. Just ctrl v Or command v and paste that in Click on save changes So as you can see yoast seo automatically removes the stuff in front. So it's only going to take the code here So once you've actually done that you want to go back to search console and click on verify And that has verified so basically it's inserted the code onto your website and google search console sort of scans your website for that code and that way it verifies your Ownership of that site right and just click on done Okay, so we finished configuring the wizard now what i'm going to show you is how to optimize a post using the yoast seo plugin So if you actually want to optimize your pages, it pretty much follows the same Process as i'm about to show you for the post for this example I'm going to show you how to optimize a blog post. So click on blog post And i'm going to add a new blog post I've already created an article which I just typed up really quickly and i'm going to show you how to Basically post it in. Okay, so i'm going to copy the title And i'm going to paste the title up here This thing here is actually not part of wordpress, but it's actually part of the theme that i'm using which is The themify ultra this is the themify builder So what i'm actually going to do with the themify builder is i'm actually going to delete it first Right. So if you hover over it on the top left You can actually remove the block Okay, so if you're actually using themify then you can just remove it for now We want to add the text into the actual wordpress editor This is the new gutenberg Uh content editor. I'm pretty new to it, but we'll give it a go. What we're gonna do is I'm, just gonna copy the text. Okay So what I recommend you guys do if you're writing a blog post is actually just type it up on google uh docs first And then add it in later to your WordPress So it's going to paste that in right? So i'm going to paste it in and it's looking pretty good Okay If you actually scroll down, okay, you'll see yoast seo Here is basically a snippet preview. So this is what actually shows up on The search results. Okay, so it gives you a complete preview of what it will look like in the search results Which is really really cool. What we're going to do is first add the focus key phrase I'm going to click on focus key phrase and enter in the keyword that you're actually targeting for that specific page Specifically i'm gonna type in how to make money online Okay, so that's my main target keyword Again, if you actually want to follow a complete seo tutorial which includes keyword research on page optimization and off page Make sure to check out the seo tutorial down below. I go through really in depth on how to actually find keywords Especially for like local businesses or if you're a blog or e-commerce website as well What we're going to do is once you've actually pasted that in Is you can click on edit snippet? And here is your seo title here by default. I'm going to leave that as is that's pretty good uh for the slug, this is basically your Sort of the name after the the url so let's just say We type in the truth about making Money online something like that. Okay. So as you can see if we go here, that's your slug Okay, so i'm going to type that in the truth about making money online And i'm going to put in a meta description So I typed one up before copy that And paste that in As you can see i've included how to make money online within the meta description. So if you actually scroll down here Okay, once you've actually put in the focus key phrase The yoast seo will actually analyze The content that you've pasted in here for the actual focus keyword It basically shows you the problems and basically i'm going to show you how to fix these problems These ones are already good. Okay, so if you don't um, because your article is going to be different then You might need to fix these ones, but i'm just going to show you A few examples of how I fix these and then you guys can actually work through your own article at your own pace So we're going to do some internal links first Right, so internal links are basically links that sort of link to another page or another post on your website and how to do that is let's say for example, we we link this text here um Okay, how to market your services Right. So select the text And here you want to click on the link Here you can type in how to This really depends on What your other post title is so you want to search for your post title here and then it'll actually show up here if you're actually unsure then what you can do is right click and Open the all your post. Okay, so you can see all your titles that you have And then you can actually search there What I like to do is if it's actual internal link Then I keep it So it actually opens in the same tab If it's an external link, I normally open it in a new tab, right? So this is an internal link I'm going to keep it as is and then you want to click on the apply button And that adds a link Right. So if you scroll down here You'll see that problem is gone the keyphrase density this is how many times your Keyword actually appears in your content Uh the percentage of it As you can see it is quite low Uh, we want to add a little bit more Of the same keyword within the article itself So what I recommend you do is to try to work it in your article naturally. You don't really want to Um add it in where it doesn't actually make sense, right? So what we're gonna do is let's try to add it in Okay, so once you have a skill you can leverage that knowledge to make Money online so that makes sense. I think So we're going to scroll down and that is gone. Another problem is the image alt attributes No images on peer on the page Okay, so adding images is really good for your blog post because it sort of breaks it up and it makes it a little bit More interesting. So i'm going to add an image to add an image I'm just going to add it here. Okay, click on add block and then you can click on image And you can click on media library Okay, so if you uploaded the image already you can select it from here if you haven't then upload files from your computer All right, so i'm going to add this one here And what i've actually done is before I uploaded the image i've actually named the image i've named it to something relevant for example a freelancer laptop And you can add in the alt text here if you want to or you can actually Select the image here and add the alt text into here What i'm going to do is type in for the alt text make money from home Okay, something like that something that's related because google actually scans your website, but sometimes they can't really understand Uh sort of what image you have The alt text will basically help them understand, right? So if I actually go down Let's hopefully that is gone. Okay, so that's gone as you can see, this is really really awesome because you can work through all of these and It helps optimize your website outbound links is basically links linking to An external link so something different from your own domain What we're going to do is link to an outbound link So here i'm going to link to amazon Okay, so i'm going to grab the amazon link And then i'm going to click on this and paste the link in here I'm going to open the link in a new tab Okay, because I sort of want to make sure that people Stay on my website, right if people click on amazon and it goes straight to amazon They might be unlikely to come back anymore So you want them to sort of stay on your website and open an external site in a new tab All right, click on apply And then scroll down That's gone This one's looking for key phrase in the subheading So we're going to look at the subheadings that I have this one's meant to be a heading so i'm gonna Select the text here and i'm going to change it to heading heading two But there's a better way to make Money online, right Scroll down That's done This one is slug stop words So if you want to understand what stop words are then you can click on this. Okay, so yoast is really really awesome Click on it and it'll actually link you to a wikipedia page to help you understand So what we're going to do is remove the stop word. I think the might be a stop word and I think about is a stop word. So we're gonna Do that Okay, so as you can see Just follow the checklist and make sure these are all green Um, you don't really have to make sure that every single one of them is green But most of them make sure it's done and then you have pretty much optimized Uh all the on-page elements that you can here if you actually click on cornerstone content This is basically If you actually tick it off then Yoast will sort of help you optimize the most important Articles on your website so you can learn more by clicking on here. This one is just a simple article so i'm not going to select that but If you have like a really really in-depth article you want to make it sort of your your main Uh piece of content for your website Then you want to turn it on right? So what we're going to do Is actually go to click on document there so to add in a category you can Select add a category. I've already added one. So i'm going to select online business uh, you can add in tags which Uh you if you want to but i'm don't think it's really necessary Click on featured image set in a featured image that makes it look a lot nicer And click on select And once that is done click on publish To view that post you can click on view post So this is the article fully optimized on page for Google and other search engines as well So if you have any questions, make sure to drop it down below. Hopefully you like this video And for more videos, make sure to subscribe to the channel. Thank you and see you guys in the next tutorial