You just completed downloading and activating the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress site — good job! Now let’s walk through the steps to configure your Yoast SEO plugin so you can be on your way to maximizing your site’s SEO capabilities.

How to Configure the Yoast SEO Plugin

Visit your Yoast plugin Settings and click to Configure your plugin.

Yoast has a helpful step-by-step that takes you through 12 questions to help configure the plugin and your site for SEO.

Step 1 is a Welcome screen that invites you to complete your plugin configuration process.

Step 2: Environment: Select if your site is live and ready to be indexed or a test site that should be hidden from indexing. Note: this designation is easy to change later once your new site is ready for the public.

Step 3: Site Type: Choose the option that best fits your website.

Step 4: Company or Person: Choose Company or Person. If you are a Company, please state your business name and upload your logo. If a Person, enter your name.

Step 5: Social Profiles: Enter links to the social media profiles you have.

Step 6: Post Visibility Type: Now we’re getting into the nitty gritty! Work through the list and decide if any of these types of content should be hidden from search indexing. 

Step 7: Multiple Authors: If your site will have more than 1 author, designate that here. 

Step 8: Google Search Console: If you’ve set up a Google Webmaster Tools Search Console account, you can connect that here. The Search Console is an invaluable way to understand how Google sees your site, identify crawl errors and dig deeper with keyword data that drives website visits. If you haven’t already set it up, you can access this area later on by clicking on the Webmaster Tools tab in the main screen of the Yoast page on your site.

Step 9: Title Settings: Give your site a name and choose what type of separator you want for your SEO title tags. The most commonly used character is the pipe (shown in the screen shot). The separator tells Google what phrases to read together. Meaning, if you had a title tag that said, ” Configure Yoast Plugin | Set Up Yoast SEO Plugin”, Google would read that as 2 phrases: Configure Yoast Plugin and Set Up Yoast SEO Plugin.

Step 10: Newsletter: You can decide if you want to receive email updates from Yoast. 

Step 11 offers you additional training videos, and Step 12 is your Success! screen.

At this point, you can rest assured that your SEO plugin is configured completely and correctly, and can begin adding your title tags and meta descriptions to your blog posts and pages.