<center>https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-00th.jpg</center> <br/><p>Would you like to read my <em>Yoast SEO</em> review and tutorial because I have been using this <em>WordPress</em> plugin for a long time and it will help you improve your <em>SEO?</em></p>
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<h2>Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!</h2>
<p>Are you ready to take a look at <em>Yoast SEO</em> in this review and tutorial of the number one <em>WordPress SEO</em> plugin?</p>
<p><em>SEO,</em> if you are brand new somehow, is <em>Search Engine Optimization.</em></p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-00th.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>The basic idea is, you want to rank whatever content you create on your <em>WordPress</em> website in the highest spot possible on <em>Google.</em> <em>Yoast SEO</em> has some very helpful features that will do that. It also has some features that, in my opinion, are not necessary and can slow down your website.</p>
<a href="https://jerrybanfield.com/?coupon-code=blogpost"><img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blogpost-coupon.jpg" alt="Coupon code"/></a>
<p>Thus, you will want to see how to use it best to empower you to rank higher in <em>Google</em> search while also not slowing down your website. You can get <em>Yoast SEO,</em> you just search for <em>"Yoast SEO"</em> or you can go to their website at <em>Yoast.com.</em></p>
<p>You will find it is a free <em>WordPress</em> plugin that you can download. If you want to know what the premium version offers that is really worthwhile. I think the main thing the premium version offers that is worthwhile is being ad free.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-01.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>You get the support, but you're probably not going to need that. You can also have the <em>Redirect Manager</em> to automatically create redirects when you change your <em>URLs.</em> I find these two are very helpful premium features, which is why I use the premium version.</p>
<p>All the rest of the core stuff that you really need is in the free version, which means that you can easily use this plugin for free, you don't need to get the premium version if you're willing to look at ads.</p>
<p>Once you've downloaded the plugin, it is <em>$89</em> currently if you want to buy it, or you've downloaded it for free, this is what it will look like on your website.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-02.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>When you get it going, it will have these different options on the sidebar. It has <em>general, search appearance, social, tools, premium</em> and <em>redirects.</em></p>
<p>The main thing I need <em>Yoast SEO</em> to do in my experience using it for years is to submit this site map index. This gives <em>Google</em> an index of all the pages on my website. This is the main thing that I care about that <em>Yoast SEO</em> does.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-03.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>This means anytime I put a new page up on my website, the sitemap is updated. The sitemap tells <em>Google</em> all the pages on my website according to the rules I've set in <em>Yoast SEO,</em> which I'll go over how to adjust what is included in <em>Google</em> search and what is not.</p>
<p><em>Yoast SEO</em> makes it very easy to include any particular post or exclude it from <em>Google SEO</em> and to include or exclude entire categories of posts from <em>Yoast SEO</em> sitemap, which then goes to <em>Google.</em> This makes it easy to control what <em>Google's</em> index is and what isn't.</p>
<p>This also eliminates the need to ever try to manually submit something to <em>Google</em> because once your sitemap is working correctly, which you set <em>Yoast SEO</em> up and it will do that for you, then you know <em>Google</em> knows exactly what is your website according to what you want <em>Google</em> to see.</p>
<p>The sitemap comes up for me once you've got your <em>Webmaster Tools</em> synced up in <em>Google,</em> once you've verified your website with <em>Google</em> in your <em>Google Webmaster Tools,</em> which <em>Yoast SEO</em> has a box where you can easily just do that.</p>
<p>You click on <em>"Webmaster tools."</em></p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-04.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>I haven't used this box because I already verified mine with <em>Google Webmaster Tools</em> directly. You can just put this <em>Google</em> verification code in directly here. You can also do it for <em>Baidu, Bing</em> and <em>Yandex,</em> then hit <em>"Save changes."</em></p>
<p>This will verify you for all of those different webmaster tools. Maybe it'd be worth my time to verify with these other search engines because I get almost all my traffic from <em>Google.</em> However, these other search engines do have traffic and most webmasters like me probably don't bother giving them the sitemap.</p>
<p>However, maybe they find it on their own. Maybe it's worth doing. This is a key step you need to take to verify your webmaster tools, so that this sitemap is submitted.</p>
<p>That's the main thing you want to do with your <em>Yoast SEO</em> plugin. Once you've got that done, most of the other stuff is extra. Most of the other stuff can help you with <em>SEO,</em> but really, if you're writing posts that are truly helpful and you've thought of putting the keywords in the title and you've written a detailed post out with helpful content, and you share that on your social media, you don't need to go in and analyze all the keywords and look at all these other insights Yoast offers you.</p>
<p>This is the dashboard on <em>Yoast SEO.</em> It doesn't have any problems or notifications.</p>
<p>Here are the features.</p>
<p>Now I'll show you my features because I recently just turned a lot of these off.</p>
<p>One downside of using <em>Yoast SEO</em> is that it can take a lot of extra resources on your <em>WordPress</em> dashboard, and I personally can't stand when the <em>WordPress</em> dashboard goes slow given I've got a website that has a lot of functionality already, including online courses with <em>LearnDash,</em> <em>WooCommerce</em> for all my <em>eCommerce</em> transactions and forums with <em>bbPress</em> along with <em>Yoast SEO</em> and performance optimization plugins.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-05.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>I don't want a bunch of extra stuff going on on my website that I don't use. For this reason, I've turned off most of <em>Yoast SEO</em> functions except for the sitemap and the <em>Ryte</em> integration, especially things like the <em>"Admin bar,"</em> I don't need the <em>SEO</em> bar on every single page when I'm in the dashboard.</p>
<p>I also turned off the security because I'm the only author that's publishing on my website, I've turned off the <em>SEO</em> analysis, the readability analysis, cornerstone content, link counter insights and links suggestion because I don't need these.</p>
<p>My friend <em>Michel</em> writes all the posts and he does a great job on the <em>SEO</em> best practices himself. If you're new to writing, if you're new to having a <em>WordPress</em> website, you might want to turn some of these on because they can help you learn how to write your posts.</p>
<p>Let's take a look inside the post and see what <em>Yoast SEO</em> adds. <em>Yoast SEO</em> adds, if you are using the <em>Gutenberg</em> editor or the classic editor, this will only be on this page. If you're using something like a page builder, it won't be on there.</p>
<p>If you're using <em>Yoast SEO,</em> you will see this little tab down here. It gives you your mobile snippet and your desktop snippet.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-06.jpg" alt="Google snippet"/>
<p>If you turn some of these other features on, you will see there are a lot more options and I initially did use those options. It would tell you about how many keywords, you can put your focus keyword in and how well your page is ranking.</p>
<p>This doesn't seem to be that necessary, in my opinion, because if you write a really helpful post and you've just put the keywords in the title and in the <em>URL,</em> and make a post that has lots of images and detail to it and you have a fast website, it will rank great in <em>Google</em> and you don't need all of those other features.</p>
<p>If you are trying super hard and putting a bunch of effort into those other features and it's not ranking, you need to revisit your content strategy. You can edit the snippet, which is helpful in here, especially if you've got a page that's ranking very high, you can go specifically edit what you want things to look like.</p>
<p>In <em>Google,</em> for example, I could edit the name of the post here. I could take a look and edit specific parts of the snippet to try to get my click through rates up.</p>
<p>This is a very helpful feature on top posts, although sometimes, if you edit one of your top posts and it's doing well, you can actually make it worse.</p>
<p>I often use a <em>"I might as well just leave it"</em> philosophy and focus on content creation.</p>
<p>That said, you can go through here and modify your exact snippet, which I have done on many pages before to help you get the highest click through in <em>Google</em> search.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-07.jpg" alt="Google snippet"/>
<p><em>Google</em> does have its own discretion and depending on what the person has searched for, may or may not actually follow what you submit in the snippet here. The most important things to do when you're setting up is to make sure you've got the name of your page related strongly to the keywords, and I like using a video on the top as well.</p>
<p>That helps reduce the number of people who click back immediately, which is a negative signal to <em>Google</em> for the user experience, and it helps people stay with me on and join <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/jerrybanfield">my <em>YouTube</em> channel</a> and watch more of my videos.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-08.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>I use the video to create the blog post, and as you see this post is very detailed. It's got a lot of text in it. The more details you have in a post, the more opportunity you have to rank for keywords that aren't actually in the title that you weren't even trying to focus on.</p>
<p><em>Yoast SEO</em> can help you see how many words your post is, which can be helpful if you use things like the readability analysis, the <em>SEO</em> analysis and the insights. You can see how long your post is, which can give you a good idea of what depth there is to it.</p>
<p>I like posts that are a thousand plus words because these tend to rank well in <em>Google.</em> I know that if I make a <em>10-minute</em> video and transcribe that into a post, it's going to be a lot over a thousand words. You can also use things like link suggestions to give you ideas of what other pages you can link to on your website.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-09.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>You can use the text link counter to see how many links you've got. The cornerstone content is for your very top posts on your website. You can mark those as cornerstone content.</p>
<p>I just use <em>Google Analytics</em> to see what those are anyway and they change over time. I'll give you some other pointers you can use to work most effectively with <em>Yoast SEO.</em></p>
<p>This is the <em>"General"</em> tab in the settings we've looked at, you can take a look at the search appearance. The search appearance is where you decide what you actually want to appear in <em>Google.</em> That means when you have posts, when you've got pages, when you have other functionality like courses, you can decide which of these you want to appear in <em>Google.</em></p>
<p>You can decide whether you want the <em>Yoast SEO</em> box on for that. What I've done is, you definitely want to include your posts in search results.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-10.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>You want to include your pages in search results. I have just left everything else. The default here on things like <em>Forums,</em> I definitely want those in search results on topics where people make replies, I want those in search results.</p>
<p>However, I have turned off a few things like I don't need my single <em>Elementor</em> templates necessarily in there, but just in case I don't understand how that works, I'll leave that on.</p>
<p>My <em>WooCommerce</em> products, I've got that on. My courses, I definitely want my online course in search results. However, I don't want my <em>LearnDash</em> lessons in search results. I just turned this off because these are <em>URLs</em> that aren't publicly accessible, you have to have bought the course on my website in order to watch the lesson.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-11.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>Therefore, why would I want something that is in a <em>LearnDash</em> lesson that can't be publicly viewed in search results?</p>
<p>Therefore, I've turned that one off and I don't need the <em>Yoast SEO</em> metadata box on those pages either because that's simply adding more things to load on my website, which means slower loading. I don't need to do <em>SEO</em> optimization when I'm putting up a lesson because that's only viewable to people who are signed into my website and have bought a course anyway.</p>
<p>On the topics, that is for <em>LearnDash</em> as well. I can tell you I don't need these in search results either. I don't need the metabox on that. I don't need quizzes. I don't need my certificates in search results. I don't need any of these things from <em>LearnDash</em> in search results like submitted essays. I don't do any of these in my courses.</p>
<p>Therefore, I turn all of these off and hit <em>"Save."</em></p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-12.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>That removes them from being included in my sitemap and sets <em>"no index"</em> on it, which is telling <em>Google,</em> <em>"Look, we don't want this in search results."</em></p>
<p>That's good because you don't want a bunch of low quality pages in your search results. Those won't provide a good user experience, and I've heard in the <em>SEO</em> world that one of the ways you can raise up your ranking is to get rid of all these low quality pages on your website.</p>
<p>Think about it this way, if <em>Google</em> sees that there's one good page on your website and a hundred low quality pages on your website, how do you think your overall reputation looks to <em>Google?</em></p>
<p>Wouldn't it look better if you took the hundred low quality pages off and just did really good at one thing?</p>
<p>This <em>Yoast SEO</em> plugin is very effective in allowing you to make those kinds of edits. You can go into more settings and take this into a higher level of detail like I have <em>"Media &amp; attachment URLs"</em> set to on.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-13.jpg" alt="WordPress seaarch apparences"/>
<p>However, I've turned off my posts categories. I don't want my archives of a bunch of different posts showing in search results because this slows down my website, and while it technically brings a small amount of search traffic, it's a mess if you actually land on the page.</p>
<p>Those pages have full-length blog posts on them, and don't accurately give a good idea of what's on the page. For example, if you search for some obscure keyword and three of my posts on an archive matched those exact keywords and bring someone to a page, then they're not getting what they're really looking for.</p>
<p>They're getting a mess of a bunch of different posts and I can't stand when I go to something like that myself, which is why I turn off categories in search results. I turn off tags in search results for the same reason. I've turned off post format. I've turned topic tags off.</p>
<p>I do have my product categories on if someone wants to search and find all the services or online courses up, that is worth offering, and I've got the tags on for <em>WooCommerce.</em></p>
<p>However, I've taken these out of search results. I don't need my course categories in search results either or my course tags, my lesson categories or my lesson tags. I also don't need the topic tags in here in search results.</p>
<p>I use this to keep my website focused on just putting things in search results that are truly helpful and taking out the redundant or unnecessary extras.</p>
<p>I have <em>"Author Archives"</em> on here. You can see the different posts I've written. That's the only kind of archives I put in search results.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-14.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>You can put date archives. I put those in, so people can see what date things are written in. I have breadcrumbs disabled because I don't see that that's necessary.</p>
<p>On the <em>RSS,</em> you can manage your <em>RSS</em> feed right here.</p>
<p>Then that takes care of the <em>"Search Appearance"</em> tab on <em>Yoast SEO.</em></p>
<p>You've also got a <em>"Social"</em> tab where you can choose whether you want open graph data. I do have the <em>Twitter</em> card turned on.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-15.jpg" alt="WordPress social cards"/>
<p>It's not necessary for <em>Facebook</em> and already's working anyway, and <em>Pinterest,</em> it is working just fine on <em>Pinterest</em> as well.</p>
<p>If you go over here into <em>"Tools,"</em> you can import and export. You've got a file editor, a bulk editor. I haven't used any of these before.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-16.jpg" alt="Yoast SEO Review + Tutorial 2020 — WordPress Plugin Setup + Best Dashboard Performance Settings!"/>
<p>You can analyze your content for internal links if you want to.</p>
<p>One last area of <em>Yoast SEO</em> that's really helpful is the redirects. Your <em>WordPress</em> host may have these themselves. However, <em>Yoast SEO</em> makes this a lot easier.</p>
<p>For example, if you delete a post on your website, <em>Yoast SEO</em> will automatically help you redirect it. That way, if you had that post in search results and you delete it because you wrote a new post or because you created a new page, you can then redirect people to that new page.</p>
<p>This will help anyone who's got the old link to go to that page, and it will help <em>Google</em> to know if it was sending search results to a different page that you now deleted, and you should go to the new page. It will help <em>Google</em> know this is a new page people should go to.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-17.jpg" alt="WordPress redirects"/>
<p>If you change the <em>URL,</em> this also creates an automatic redirect, which is annoying sometimes because if you've just created a page, then you switch the <em>URL</em> right after you created it, you don't need a redirect 2 seconds after you just created something. In that case, you can just hit undo and it will take that unnecessary redirect off.</p>
<p>If you've got <em>Yoast SEO</em> on and you've played around, and you've had your website up for years, you've consistently deleted pages and had redirects, sometimes you will find that <em>Yoast SEO</em> redirects is why your pages are working weird.</p>
<p>For example, I had an error with <em>WooCommerce</em> where every time I went to my <em>website.com/cart</em> it kept redirecting me to the homepage automatically. That got really annoying until I realized that <em>Yoast SEO</em> from four years before when I had used <em>WooCommerce</em> and deleted it, had created a redirect from <em>Jerrybayfield.com/cart</em> to <em>Jerrybanfield.com.</em></p>
<p>Once I deleted the redirect in <em>Yoast,</em> then all the <em>WooCommerce</em> default pages work just fine. That was really annoying to try to figure that out. Thus, you want to make sure you realize that when you're using Y<em>oast SEO,</em> it's automatically creating redirects when you delete stuff.</p>
<p>You want to check your redirects from time to time, to make sure there's nothing on here that shouldn't be on here, that you have your redirects going where they should go and that they're genuinely helpful, and not causing any issues or just on there for no reason.</p>
<p>I cleaned up my redirects a few times and now I've got things working much better on my website. This can be very helpful to know and I'm grateful for the chance to talk about these with you.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-18.jpg" alt="Wordpress plugin"/>
<p>You've now got a good overview and review of the <em>Yoast SEO</em> plugin.</p>
<p>I'm very grateful this plugin makes it so easy for me to get indexed in <em>Google</em> search when I make a new post or when someone makes a post on my forums, when I publish a new course or new product on my website.</p>
<p>It handles all that. It's an outstanding free plugin and that why it's the number one plugin. However, it has some features that can slow down your website, which won't be a problem if you're just using this plugin and not a whole bunch of others.</p>
<p>However, the more plugins you use, the more you want to make sure you're not using anything unnecessary in the plugin.</p>
<p><em>Yoast SEO</em> occasionally can conflict with some other plugins. If you suspect there might be a conflict, you can just disable the plugin to see if it fixes the conflict. If it doesn't, then you can just turn it back on and it'll work just fine.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for watching all this and learning about <em>Yoast SEO</em> with me.</p>
<p>I hope this is helpful.</p>
<h3>Last words</h3>
<p>Yes, you watched all the way to the end of this video. You rock! You are one of the top <em>5%</em> of viewers that stuck around and I've got an offer for you that I think you'll love.</p>
<img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NBP110-19.jpg" alt="WordPress course"/>
<p>What you just saw was a free preview from <a href="https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/wordpress/">my huge <em>WordPress</em> course</a> on my website at <em>Jerrybanfield.com.</em> You can take this entire course for free if it's your first course with me on <em>Jerrybanfield.com</em> by using the coupon code <em>"blogpost"</em> at checkout.</p>
<p>I'll show you exactly how to do that right now. Just click on the course, the <em>WordPress eCommerce</em> course, click on <em>"Add to cart,"</em> it will put it in your cart. Type in <em>"blogpost"</em> and give it a minute to refresh. It will put the coupon code and allow you to take the course totally for free.</p>
<p>If you'd like the best experience, if you've got questions, if you want to get some feedback on your business, go to <em><a href="https://jerrybanfield.com/call/">Jerrybanfield.com/call</a></em> because that's what I found most entrepreneurs really need. There are so many courses that have so much good information. How do you use it?</p>
<p>I am really good at taking what you're doing and processing it, and giving you the best way forward to help you focus on your biggest opportunities.</p>
<p>I've got incredibly affordable group calls you can join to get in and have a call with me and if you want the best experience, sign up for a one-on-one call or a coaching package today at <em><a href="https://jerrybanfield.com/call/">Jerrybanfield.com/call</a></em> where I'll help you build your business online.</p>
<p>I trust if you've got to this point and <a href="https://youtu.be/Y8LhGSSiEtc">you're still watching</a> past the sales pitch, you will love being a subscriber. If you haven't already hit that subscriber button, turn those notifications on and get ready for amazing new videos like this every day, plus inspiring stories and sometimes images that I hope you'll find useful.</p>
<p>I appreciate you watching today. I'm looking forward to seeing you on <em>Jerrybanfield.com</em> and in the next video.</p>
<a href="https://jerrybanfield.com/?coupon-code=blogpost"><img src="https://jerrybanfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blogpost-coupon.jpg" alt="Coupon code"/></a>
<p>I love you.</p>
<p>I hope you have a wonderful day today.</p>
<p>Love,<br><em>Jerry Banfield</em></p>
<p>Edits from video transcript by <em><a href="http://www.michelgerardonline.com">Michel Gerard</a></em>.</p>
 <br /><center><hr/><em>Posted from my blog with <a href='https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/'>SteemPress</a> : https://jerrybanfield.com/yoast-seo-review/ </em><hr/></center>