Without a doubt YOAST is one of the most powerful SEO plugins for WordPress that a blogger can use.
From creating sitemaps that search engines can easily read to helping you easily and quickly set your metas for a post, it makes many SEO tasks easy to implement.
In this quick tutorial, we’re going to talk about how to find and set metas using YOAST in your WordPress posts and pages.
Using YOAST to Set your Meta Title and Description for Search
YOAST makes it really easy as you write and update posts to quickly and easily adjust the title and the description displayed.
The first thing you need to do is install the plugin. The free version is fine for the majority of the basic SEO work you need.
Then write your post.
Below the post (usually) you will find your YOAST SEO settings.
Below the Focus keyphrase, you find the Google preview box.
In this preview box you can select the buttons at the top to display what is seen on Mobile and what is seen on Desktop.
To adjust the meta title and meta description, you need to click on Edit snippet.
You will see
- SEO Title
- Slug
- Meta Description
SEO Title in YOAST
The SEO Title is auto-populated based on the settings in YOAST.
The standard is above. It takes the title from the post, or the page title, followed by a separator — for example a tilde (~) or a hyphen (-) — and then your site title.
It’s good practice is to rewrite this, because of the difference in available space between your post titles and the SEO title.
The Slug!
The slug is the URL.
If this is a post that you are updating then DO NOT TOUCH THE SLUG, unless you know how to perform a redirect. Changing the slug on an existing post will change its URL, break the old URL link and deliver an error — a bad user experience and terrible for SEO.
If this is a new post then use this spot to create a short and concise URL for your post.
Meta Description
This is the description that you would like Google or other search engines to display.
Craft it so that it is a hook to get people to read your post when they are presented with a list of posts on the search page.
The GREEN lines
The green lines are there as a guide. If you can get your title and description to fit, excellent!
If they are under and the title or description works, then that is good too.
If you go over, then search engines WILL cut your titles and your descriptions. Boo!
Now you’ve got the basics on using YOAST to set meta titles and meta descriptions.
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