So ...

If you access the YOAST SEO => Search appearance page, you'll see seven new tabs.

On the first "General" tab you can customize the appearance of your actual search page result. You can define the format of your SEO title, you can add variables to your default meta description template and you can define the symbol to use as your title separator. The latter one will display, for instance, between your post title and site name:

My recommendation: keep the default settings. They will work fine for anything you have published, and you'll define your own unique SEO title and your own unique meta tag for each new post (using the according YOAST meta boxes displayed in the post or page editor).

The next "Content Types" tab will allow you to specify what the default search appearance should be for your posts and your pages. Basically, you can choose which content types appear in search results and what their default description should be.

My recommendation: use the default settings.

Next, the "Media" tab. When you upload a media element (an image or video) to Wordpress, it doesn't just save the media, it creates an attachment URL for it. These attachment pages are quite empty: they contain the media item and maybe a title if you entered one. And usually, you will never use these attachment URLs, so it's better to disable them, and redirect them to the media item itself. Which is the default option:

Next, the "Taxonomies" tab. This is where you can exclude your category pages from the search results. If you have a lot of categories and well-designed, keyword-rich category pages, you can leave it enabled. Otherwise is pointless to display miserly category pages with thin content ...

And below, you can exclude the tag pages too ... And you should, because the thag pages are completely useless and more than that, can cause duplicate content:

Next, the "Archives" tab. This is where you can exclude the archive pages (author and date archives) from the search results. This is an important feature, because if you're running a one author blog, the author archive will be exactly the same as your blogroll, and that means duplicate content. It's highly recommended to disable both options:

Next, the "Breadcrumbs" tab. Breadcrumbs are navigational aids that appear as text at the top of your content ... For example: You are here > Home ... Personally, I don't like them ... If you have a clear main menu, it's just an additional clutter ... But of course, is your choice. You can enable and customize this feature if you want ...

Finally, the "RSS" tab. The RSS feeds are often used by content scrapers to retrieve content from your website. And YOAST will allow you to add a backlink to your own site for each post in your RSS feed, so Google will know that you are the original source. You can define the author link, the post link, the blog link, and the blog description:

OK. Let's move forward to the next lesson to see some other cool features ...