How was the talk "Optimize your website: Configure Yoast SEO to improve your ranking"

The numbers

Aimed at the talk: 62 people.
Assistants: 38 people.
It was held on June 3, 2019 in the space that gives us ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

Configuration of Yoast SEO: The talk

Close to summer, we return to the wonderful world of SEO, this time starting with the basics: the configuration of the Yoast SEO plugin to get the most out of it. From the hand of Constantí BernabeuWe'll go into the ins and outs of this plugin so we don't miss out on everything it has to offer. Constantí has been working as a computer scientist for 30 years. He's been with WordPress for 4 years and the last 3 focused on SEO. To review everything Yoast SEO has to offer, share with us your presentation on Yoast SEO configuration With which you can follow this post.

As in all meetups, we had at the end the classic round of questions at the end of their talk. And to end the day we also enjoyed networking accompanied by refreshments at the kiosk in the Plaza de San Cristóbal thanks to our sponsors: Professional Hosting , your trusted hosting, and Weglot, the plugin to translate your web to the language you want.

We remark below some points that have been interesting to us although we include at the end of this post The full video of the presentation.

Topic Overview

We enter SEO for beginners.
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the basic ones in WordPress for SEO management.
It is a free plugin (it has a premium version that at basic user level is not necessary) that you can find among the WordPress plugins.
For the presentation, Constantí has created the website seodetronos.com and thus be able to see in a practical way everything you tell us about the plugin and SEO in general.
Yoast SEO is very useful when you understand what it does, but you have to keep in mind that you can't trust the OKs it shows you if you don't set criteria.

Installing the plugin

As part of the plugins that WordPress has, you can directly install from the tool itselflooking for "Yoast SEO".
We leave you anyway the direct link to the Yoast SEO plugin in case you want to take a preview.
It you install And activate.
Once installed, it appears integrated in WordPress's own menu with all its index.

Configuring Yoast SEO

The plugin itself offers a configuration wizard to be able to start from a basic configuration with a few questions.
The interesting thing is to understand what you do in each step in order to be able to modify what interests us.
Dissuade search enginesBetter to activate this option when we are setting up our website. Until we have a first "presentable" version of it, it is better that search engines do not find our page. What Yoast does when we check this option is to include in the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /". Once we uncheck the option, the file will be left with the line "Disallow: /wp-admin/" so that the only thing that is dissuaded is the access as administrator. It is also interesting that the file contains access to the sitemaps file.
Type of siteEveryone who chooses what best suits their website. It's not a big deal.
Visibility of search engines: when the search engines already see our page, we can indicate what types of elements of it we want them to find and which not: entries, pages, products ...
Various authorsIf there is only going to be one author, it would be better to mark that not so that the information related to authors is not shown in the search engines because it would come out without content and would penalize the SEO of our web.
Title AdjustmentsName of the website and title separator.

With this information the configuration wizard ends, but as we are in the free version, it shows us information that you consider interesting to encourage us to buy the premium version.

We checked the Yoast menu to see what you have automatically set up after the wizard.

CharacteristicsYou can enable or disable all the necessary features, which will show more or less options when writing an entry or page.
- SEO analysis is better to leave it activated because if we are not removing the greatest functionality of the plugin.
- Readability analysis: check if we have very long sentences, if we use complex words or not.
- Site map: If we click on the interrogation that accompanies it we see the map that Yoast himself has created of our site. It is actually an index of Sitemaps, as many as types of elements we have said we want to show in search engines.
Webmaster tools tabYou can include the verification code of your website within Google Search Console. Yoast SEO takes advantage of this tool to give you directly the ads it shows, although this service may only be with the premium version. In that case, there are other simple plugins that can offer you this service.
Writing BlocksWe indicate what we want to show in the Yoast SEO configuration box when we are creating our entries, pages, products,... Normally we leave all the options, but we could indicate what options we leave depending on the type of element we are creating.
Attached media URLsThe images can be treated like any other element of the web, although the normal thing is to put them the title and the ALT and little more. In case we want to give them weight and treat with more dedication to position, we activate this option.
- Also appear below the rest of taxonomies that are part of our website, depending on the theme and plugins we have installed. With the wizard, Yoast has left all taxonomies marked for display in the search engine, but it is our mission to unselect those we see that make no sense, for example, formats or shipping classes of a product (in the case of an online store).
- The goal is always not to show garbage from our site, but only what we are interested in positioning. When we uncheck an option it disappears from the sitemaps-index.xml file.
Breadcrumbs (breadcrumbs)They can be activated. They serve to know in each page where we are inside the menu of the web. To do this, usually at the top, appears the path menu / submenu where you find the page we are visiting at all times.

Use and operation

Constantí shows us with an example of a web page what Yoast SEO can show us so that we can understand to what extent we can trust the indications of the plugin and at what moment we have to apply ourselves criteria and not take into account some suggestions. When creating an entry we see the Yoast SEO box with the relevant indications using red, yellow or green circles to mark which aspects are bad, can be improved or are good. It will also put a grey circle for those aspects that are not revisable.

Nowadays 70 or 80% of the accesses to the webs are made through mobile so as a suggestion, mark the option of mobile analysis, not paying much attention to the analysis by desktop.
In the example there are a couple of meaningless paragraphs taken from Latin and there are already aspects that Yoast SEO treats as being correct. This is because Yoast is not able to identify in many aspects that the text makes sense in the chosen language, but what it seeks is that there are many phrases, which are short to make it easier to read, not to use much passive voice, which is divided into paragraphs, which has different levels of titles / subtitles to structure the content ...
Readability analysis: indicates if the text is difficult to read, but not because of the content but because of the way in which the phrases are written: if the phrases use transition wordsare short, have images between the text to help visually understand the content...
- Therefore, it is not necessary to write for Google but for our readers, as we would like to read that content on the Internet, and with just enough words and necessary to express what we want to count, even in the case that Yoast punctuates us under some case.
- If we write a lot of words, Yoast suggests including it as core content.
Target key phraseWe will introduce the search intent that we want to position.
Every time Yoast analyses an aspect, and it is directly affected by words written in the text, it puts to the right of it an icon of an eye on which we can click with the mouse to show us where the words affected by the aspect being analysed are on our page (it shows them highlighted with fluorescent).
SEO title width and metadescription length: Yoast reviews these two aspects to make them long enough. You have to be careful because it is not good that they are excessively long either. Yoast also controls this point.
When we write our entry it is important to use synonyms, especially considering also the words used by the competition. If we talk about "cars" but we see that our competition also talks about "vehicles" it is good to use this word as well.
It is interesting to end our entries or pages with a final action for our followers, from the "Contact Now" style.
Ideally, concepts should not be mixed on the same page. If we create a page to talk about tomatoes, don't put pears in it too, better create another page to talk about pears. This is the best way to position ourselves for the concepts that interest us. If we mix many concepts on the same page, Google will not know well what the search criterion is and will show the page in a more random way, thus losing positioning.
Finally, it is interesting to improve the content, reviewing not only the synonyms we have already commented on but also adding quotes, images, bold and italics for those concepts that we want to highlight (mainly what has to do with our search intention), links to reference both other pages of our website and some external reference page.
Keep in mind that images also help to position, not only themselves in image searches, but also as content of our own page. For them it is very important to fill in both the Title attribute and the ALT attribute, so that when the search engine finds it, it knows what the image is about. Some people copy and paste the same text in both fields, which is a waste of opportunities for SEO.
Social box: There are fields for facebook and twitter. The two are identical. If we leave them blank, when someone shares our page in these two social networks will appear what Yoast considers. The best thing is to adapt the fields to each network so that it shows what we want.
Should search engines follow links from this page (YES/NO): To this option is useful to say NO when only if we have large sites. When we say NO, the robot that comes to check our website, will stay all the time on our pages. If we say YES, with every external link he finds, he'll go to him to check it out. On large sites, this can cause you to be "lost" to external links and not have time to review all of our pages. A small site is one with 1000 pages or less.

Tips

Use common sense: it is not enough just to be guided by the green faces that Yoast makes. Yoast is a plugin that goes as far as it goes, the rest is up to you.
Don't write for Google, write for your users, even if Yoast in some case tells you that something is wrong.
Don't get overwhelmed, Yoast is just the tip of the iceberg in the SEO world, so take it just as an aid.

Final networking questions and issues

QUESTIONWhen it is advisable to allow search engines to find our website, when we have all the pages created or at the time of creating the website and then create page by page.

RESPONSEIt depends on the web. If you have all the structure ready, you can activate the website and then create content. Keep in mind that you can create each entry as a draft and publish it when you have finished. If your website needs a minimum published content to make sense and you need a couple of weeks to do so, it may be better not to activate it until you have published that minimum content. It's very interesting to take a look at the sitemap.xml file and be sure what we're showing search engines, to make sure we're showing what we want and not something else. Each one of the sitemaps that appear to us should have significant content, if not, it is better to remove it (it is frequent that "author" for example is not significant and we do not want it to appear).

QUESTIONHow to upload the Sitemap to the web for search engines to know.

RESPONSEThere are two ways and both can be used. On the one hand, in the robots.txt file you can/should include a line indicating which is the path of our file sitemap.xml Normally the robots.txt file is created dynamically by Yoast SEO. However, if we want to modify it ourselves, we can create one and upload it via FTP to our hosting server. In that case the one we have physically stored in our server will always prevail over the one that Yoast dynamically creates. It is also possible/should be informed through our Search Console account which is the sitemap.xml file of our website.

Glossary

Google Search Console It is a Google web tool where you register your page and analyze it, looking for broken links, seeing its performance, if it is optimized for mobile, the coverage of the index, you can include the sitemap...
Transition wordsWordPress: These are words that help robots understand the structure of our WordPress content. They are normally used at the beginning of paragraphs. There are many types of transition words, since it depends on whether the content is structured chronologically, or as a list of elements, or as a header, node and outcome... Ex: At the beginning... After... Finally...
Search IntentIn the past, in order to position ourselves, we used to ask for one or more keywords for which we wanted to be positioned by search engines. Now what is requested is a search intention, that is, what the user is looking for that information. If we say we want to position by "pizza" it would be a key word. Now, what does the user want to do with "pizza"? buy it, cook it, eat it in a good restaurant in Alicante, ...? That would be the intention of search and that is what we really write in Google today to do a search.
Essential contentIt is the one that indicates to the search engines that it is an important content for your web, that it has more relevance within all your site, with more information than the average that you write normally. Of course, that brand will not by itself make your site appear on the first page of the search engine. In order to do this, SEO will have to work well and not just include this brand.