Worst Yoast SEO Settings Mistakes to Avoid
November 26. 2019
Does it feel like you are putting in all the necessary work and doing everything by the book, but you are still not ranking #1 for your focus keywords? Most likely, that’s because you are making one of the worst Yoast SEO settings mistakes – or a couple of them. If you can relate to this scenario, then you are in good company. The Yoast SEO plugin is a powerful tool that can help you work on website optimization and the implementation of some of its key elements effortlessly. But that’s only if used the right way! Make one of the five following mistakes we often see people make, and you won’t be reaping the results you want and deserve!
The five worst Yoast SEO settings mistakes
Don’t get us wrong – there are actually more than five mistakes that you should do your best to avoid. These are just the five most common ones and, therefore, the most detrimental ones. Let our WordPress experts guide you so that your work doesn’t end up being in vain.
1. Forgetting to verify your website in Google Webmasters Tools
You want your site to be found on the web. You want to track its search performance with Google Search consoles. The Google Webmasters Tools can help you with that and so much more. Unfortunately, many people forget to verify their website in Google Webmasters Tools or they simply don’t know the importance of doing it. Don’t let that be you! Instead, sign up for this powerful tool and enter your secret site key. You will now be able to view errors, resolve them, as well as submit sitemaps – which brings us to another important point of order.
2. People often forget to enable sitemaps, making one of the worst Yoast SEO settings mistakes
One should never underestimate the importance of sitemaps. They help your website gain better visibility with search engines, but they also improve user experience by making your website easy to navigate. That’s why there are two types of sitemaps:
- HTML sitemaps – for humans
- XML sitemaps – for the search engines
The Yoast SEO plugin, being useful as it is, already has a built-in option of generating a dynamic sitemap. But in order to enable this option, you need to navigate to Dashboard > Yoast SEO (General) > Webmasters Tools. You will just have to toggle the XML sitemaps bar from off to on and you will be able to navigate to your website’s XML sitemap. But the errors associated with sitemaps don’t end here.
3. Not submitting your XML sitemap to Google Webmasters Tools
This is an obvious situation that shows us how one mistake can easily turn into three. You won’t be able to submit your sitemap to Google Webmasters Tools unless you have already verified your ownership of your website and without an XML sitemap in place, the Google search engine won’t be able to quickly index your pages. If you want to submit your XML sitemap to Google Webmasters Tools, sign in to google.com/webmasters/tools. In the left-hand menu, navigate to Crawl > Sitemaps and click ADD/ TEST SITEMAP.
If you want to boost the SEO of your WordPress website, you really shouldn’t forget about sitemaps when configuring the setting of the Yoast SEO plugin. And generating one won’t mean as much without submitting it to the Google Webmasters Tools. Make sure you look at the big picture and avoid these common Yoast SEO settings mistakes.
4. Disregarding the Yoast SEO social settings
With the immense power that social media holds these days, you really shouldn’t allow yourself to make a cardinal mistake that not utilizing its potential will be. Social media posting is a great way to attract more traffic to your website and spike up the public’s interest in your line of work. So if the prospect of embedding social media feeds to your WordPress website will be so beneficial, then how come lots of people forget to do it? It’s because they are not mindful of the worst Yoast SEO settings mistakes that can easily happen to anyone.
So make sure you go to Dashboard > Yoast SEO (social) > Accounts. Here you will be able to fill out your social handles for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms you may be using. We highly recommend that you make sure this step isn’t skipped – even if you are not the one to spend your days scrolling through the content on these platforms. Because we can assure you that a large portion of your target audience is spending a good part of their day doing precisely that.
5. Leaving no time to edit the homepage meta
Your homepage is the face of your business! That’s why it deserves a lot of time, effort, and devotion from you! Besides, your homepage will be crawled a lot more than the rest of your high-impact landing pages, so you need to be focused when filling up its SEO. And to do that, you must properly set titles, meta descriptions and meta tags on your homepage.
In order to get to these settings, first access your Dashboard. Then navigate to Yoast SEO (Search Appearance) > General. You will see the ‘editing the front page itself’ link, which will take you to the SEO settings of your homepage. Now all you have to do is come up with good meta and title. Try to be creative yet informative, and take as much time as you need when it comes to this task. Since these settings have a big part in how the public views your business, let’s just say every second you invest in it will be well worth it. Disregarding this part will only help you make one of the worst Yoast SEO settings mistakes, and we’ve already established you should do your best to avoid them.