SEO and Yoast
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of planning your online content around keywords and standards that will improve the chances of your content being found easily through search engines. The better your content meets these SEO standards, the more visitors you'll receive to your website.
Yoast SEO is a leading plugin designed to help you measure and improve the quality of your content around keywords that are defined by you. The plugin is so handy, we install their plugin on all of our sites.
If you're interested in learning more, Yoast has tons of great resources on their website, including this beginner's guide and how to choose perfect keywords.
Other favorite resources include:
Using Yoast to optimize the display of your content on social media platforms.
Enabling XML sitemaps so that Google can retrieve your pages more quickly.
Using the text link counter to see how well you're using your links.
These features will then be displayed through a Yoast panel on your pages and posts while you're editing them, which looks something like this:
Customizing your Yoast Features
On new sites, we have disabled some of the more resource-intensive features of the Yoast plugin, since we have found that active but unused features may negatively impact and slow down the performance of some sites.
The following advanced Yoast features may have been disabled to optimize the performance of your site, but you can activate them if you'd like to use these features:
SEO Analysis
Readability Analysis
Cornerstone content
Ryte integration for indexability
A Yoast Admin Bar display may have also been disabled simply to remove screen clutter.
Note: We have two sets of instructions, one for Yoast 19 and Yoast 20.0. Yoast updated the location of their settings in version 20.0. Please check which version you are using before proceeding.
Yoast plugin version 20.0 and above
When Yoast is installed and activated on your website, you'll see something like this in the side navigation:
You can use the "Settings" menu option here to navigate to your list of features, where you can then easily toggle your preferred features on or off for your site:
Yoast plugin version 19 and below
When Yoast is installed and activated on your website, you'll see something like this in the side navigation:
You can use the "General" menu option here to navigate to your list of features, where you can then easily toggle your preferred features on or off for your site:
Updating Social Sharing with Yoast SEO
If you don’t like what you see in the Object Debugger, it’s easy to change using the Yoast SEO plugin that we’ve installed on your site. You can define a new title, description, and/or image for the page, then tell Facebook to “refresh” to get this new information for sharing.
To change this information for a page, in the WordPress Administrator Interface, go to Pages > All Pages and Edit the page you wish to update. On the Edit page, scroll down to the Yoast SEO section and click the sharing icon:
Here, you can enter your own Title, Description, and Image that you want to use when the page is shared on social channels.
Duplicating a Page
IMPORTANT: When you Duplicate a page in WordPress to create a new page, the new page retains ALL of the information from the old page including the Social Sharing settings and social sharing page title. You will need to manually update the Social Sharing settings for the new page or delete the Social Sharing settings for the new page.
If you don't change or delete the Social Sharing settings for the new page, sharing the new page on social media will display the information of the original page which could be confusing to your site visitors.
Refreshing Sharing
Facebook very kindly lets you request an update to the sharing information for any URL using the Object Debugger noted above.
To request a refresh, go to the Object Debugger and enter the URL for the page you just updated. Click Fetch new scrape information:
Scroll down to the When shared, this is what will be included section to see your updated sharing information.
Unfortunately, other social media services don’t offer such an easy way to request an update to your social media info for a URL. Instead, they have a regular timeline on when they update social media sharing info.
Twitter updates weekly. That said, if you copy and paste a link in your Twitter client of choice to preview it, it usually will refresh and update your sharing info.
LinkedIn updates weekly, and unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to force a refresh.