Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. Most bloggers install it, run through the configuration wizard once, and never look at the advanced settings again. Those advanced settings are where the real SEO wins, and losses, actually hide. This post covers what to change once the wizard is done.

Yoast SEO settings dashboard in WordPress admin

The traffic-light trap

Yoast’s red, orange, and green dots for each post pull most users’ attention immediately. They’re also the least important part of the plugin.

Google does not care about Yoast’s green dot. The traffic light measures keyword density, paragraph length, and other heuristics that trace back to 2014-era SEO thinking. Write naturally for humans instead of chasing a color. A red dot doesn’t mean a post won’t rank; plenty of well-ranking posts carry one.

Ignore the lights entirely and focus on the settings below instead.

Search Appearance: the most important section

Go to SEO → Search Appearance. This is where you configure how each content type shows up in Google.

Content Types tab

For each post type (Posts, Pages, custom types), set:

  • Show in search results: Yes for posts and pages. No for any internal or admin-only custom post types.
  • SEO title template: usually %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%, which keeps the post title first.
  • Meta description template: leave blank and write manually per post.
  • Schema page type: “Web Page” for pages, “Article” for posts (or “Blog Posting” for blog posts specifically).

Taxonomies tab

For categories and tags:

  • Categories, show in search results: Yes. Category archives make genuinely useful landing pages.
  • Tags, show in search results: Usually No. Most tag archives are thin content that just competes with your category archives for the same search intent.

The tag archive default of “indexed” creates duplicate-content-like issues on most blogs. Set it to noindex unless you’ve deliberately built out rich, substantial tag pages.

Archives tab

  • Author archives: disable entirely on single-author blogs, since the archive just duplicates the homepage. Enable but noindex on multi-author blogs unless you specifically want author-page SEO.
  • Date archives: disable. They duplicate content elsewhere on the site and rarely rank for anything useful.

Breadcrumbs

Under SEO → Search Appearance → Breadcrumbs, enable this feature.

Breadcrumbs help both users and Google understand your site’s hierarchy. They also generate breadcrumb schema, which Google sometimes displays directly in search results.

Add the breadcrumb code to your theme, or use a Yoast block or shortcode. Most modern themes, Aurora included, support breadcrumbs natively without extra setup.

Social: Open Graph and Twitter cards

Under SEO → Social, two settings matter most:

  • Default social image: set a site-wide fallback image at 1200 by 630 pixels. When you share a post without a featured image, this image gets used instead.
  • Per-post social images: the Social tab on each post lets you set custom Open Graph and Twitter card images. Customize these for your highest-traffic posts.

The default behavior of using the featured image is usually fine. Per-post customization matters mainly when the featured image isn’t optimized for social sharing aspect ratios.

Yoast social settings panel showing default OG image upload

XML sitemaps

Under SEO → General → Features → XML Sitemaps, this is enabled by default.

Your sitemap lives at yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. Submit that URL in Google Search Console.

Verify the following:

  • Posts are in the sitemap.
  • Pages are in the sitemap.
  • Categories are in the sitemap, if you’re indexing them.
  • Tag archives are NOT in the sitemap, if you’ve noindexed them.

Yoast handles sitemap inclusion based on your noindex settings automatically. It’s still worth a sanity check after any big settings change.

Canonical URLs

The canonical URL tag tells Google which URL is the “official” version of a page when duplicates exist, such as a trailing slash versus no slash, or www versus non-www.

Yoast sets canonicals automatically, and you can override them per post from the Yoast post settings under the Advanced tab.

Override in these situations:

  • You republished a post on Medium and want Google to credit your blog. Set the Medium copy’s canonical to point at your blog post.
  • You have a series of near-duplicate posts and want one designated as canonical.
  • You’re migrating content and want to consolidate ranking signals onto one URL.

Don’t override canonicals casually, though. Getting them wrong can genuinely tank rankings.

Advanced settings per post

Each post’s Yoast meta box has an Advanced tab with these options:

  • Allow search engines to show this post: Yes by default. Set to No to noindex a specific post, such as legal pages or thin content.
  • Should search engines follow links: Yes by default. This affects whether outbound links pass ranking signal.
  • Meta robots advanced: additional directives like noimageindex or nosnippet. Rarely needed for a typical blog.
  • Canonical URL: covered above.

Internal linking suggestions

Yoast Premium offers internal linking suggestions as you write. It suggests existing posts to link to based on what you’re typing.

Internal linking is one of the highest-ROI SEO activities available to a blogger, so if you have Premium, use this feature actively. If you don’t, manually link to related posts every time you publish. Our essential WordPress settings checklist is a good example of a post that benefits from linking out to related deep-dives as you write it.

Cornerstone content

Mark your most important posts as “cornerstone content” in the Yoast meta box.

This has a few effects:

  • Yoast Premium’s internal linking suggests these posts more often elsewhere on the site.
  • Cornerstone posts get stricter readability analysis, on the assumption they should be flagship-quality writing.
  • It helps you mentally organize what your actual pillar content is.

Schema settings

Yoast generates schema markup automatically. Worth verifying:

  • Your About page has its schema type set to “About Page.”
  • Your Contact page has “Contact Page.”
  • Your blog posts use Article or BlogPosting, configurable from the Content Types tab.

You can override the schema type per post if a specific post needs something different. A recipe post, for example, should use Recipe schema, usually added by a dedicated recipe plugin rather than Yoast itself; see our recipe card plugin setup guide for that setup.

Webmaster tools verification

Under SEO → General → Webmaster Tools, paste in verification codes for Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yandex.

This is an alternative to dropping verification meta tags directly into your theme. It’s easier to manage and survives theme changes without breaking.

RSS feed customization

Under SEO → Search Appearance → RSS, you can add a backlink to your post at the end of every RSS item.

This matters because content scrapers often republish your RSS feed wholesale. A backlink at the bottom means scraped copies automatically link back to your site, which can actually help SEO even from content you didn’t authorize.

Settings to leave alone

  • Readability analysis tweaks, which mostly don’t matter for real writing.
  • Keyword density settings, which Google stopped weighing meaningfully years ago.
  • Most “Tools” features, unless you have a specific, named reason to use them.

Yoast Premium vs free

The free version does roughly 90% of what most bloggers actually need.

Premium adds:

  • Internal linking suggestions.
  • Multiple keyword optimization per post.
  • A redirect manager.
  • Social previews.
  • Workouts, which are guided multi-step SEO tasks.

The redirect manager alone is worth Premium for many bloggers, since it tracks 404s and lets you redirect them without ever touching .htaccess. Current Yoast SEO Premium pricing runs around $129/year per site, which now bundles the Local SEO, News SEO, and Video SEO add-ons that used to cost extra separately. Worth it if you’re actively growing; skip it if you’re just starting out and still finding your footing.

Yoast vs Rank Math vs SEOPress

Yoast is the most popular option. Rank Math packs more features into its free tier, which we cover in our Rank Math advanced features deep dive. SEOPress is lighter and faster than either. All three work fine in practice. The plugin you choose matters less than configuring whichever one you use correctly, and pairing it with a theme that doesn’t fight your SEO plugin on markup and speed. Aurora’s SEO-focused build is designed with exactly that in mind.

Where the actual wins are hiding

Yoast’s defaults work, but they leave SEO wins on the table. Configure search appearance per content type, noindex your tag and date archives, enable breadcrumbs, set a default social image, verify your sitemap is submitted, and use cornerstone marking on your flagship posts. Ignore the traffic lights entirely. The advanced settings are where the actual SEO lives.