4. Work on the Titles and Metas

Having completed the setting up of the Yoast SEO general settings, it’s time to pick the next step right away which is about your the titles and metas.

The titles and metas are the areas of Yoast that tell Googlebot what should be indexed and crawled on your site. So, it’s the most crucial step for utilizing the Yoast SEO plugin.

Though the kind of website or blog you run may determine how you will go about the settings, the major purpose for which the hundreds of thousands of bloggers are using this plugin is always the same.

The Yoast SEO settings were obviously done wrongly by most veteran bloggers out there. This must be checked to ensure you don’t do the same while launching Yoast on your WordPress site.

You should also check properly on your site for duplicate content. Where on your site did you post any content that has already been published somewhere else within your blog posts? Which of the pages on your site has been duplicated?

The duplicate content published will hurt your rankings terribly in the sense that Googlebot wouldn’t know where it should rank on your site and where it shouldn’t. So, you’ll make Google suffer these worries and your ranking gets hurt eventually.

Because of the duplicate content penalty from Google, you need to choose the “Noindex” option for duplicate pages, media, picture gallery and some other content on your site which some plugins might have duplicated from other sources.

All these should be taken care of lest you hurt your Google ranking. So far these duplicate pages are not really important for your site ranking, it’s better to “Noindex” them. Normally, you choose the “Noindex” option through the Post Types.

Finally, under the ‘Taxonomies’ tab on your Yoast dashboard, you may want to “Noindex the tags and categories as these are commonly duplicated pages on most sites except you use them in a special way on your own site.