How to configure the Yoast SEO Search Appearance settings: General tab | Yoast SEO for WordPress

Hi, we're on the Search Appearance settingsfor Yoast SEO.

In this screencast, we'll focuson the first tab, called “General”.

You'll find three different sections here, indicated by three different headings, called “Title separator”, “Homepage”and “Knowledge Graph & Schema.

org”.

First of all, you can choosethe title separator.

The title separator determineswhat we use to separate different parts of your SEO titlefrom each other in the search results.

At Yoast, we tend to use this bullet between, for instance, the site nameand the title of a page.

Let me show you what that looks likein the search results.

Let's google “keyword research Yoast”.

OK, if you look at the first result, you'll see the bullet appearbetween the name of the post (Keyword research for SEO:the ultimate guide) and the site name(which is Yoast).

Of course, you can also use dashes or pipes, or something else.

What you choose depends mostly on taste, but if you choose a longer one, like this em dash, the amount of spacethat you have for your title shrinks by the space that the title separatortakes up in your title.

So we usually recommend pickinga shorter one, like dots, or a pipe.

The problem that we have with a pipeis that it looks too much like the letter L.

Let's move on to the second section, called “Homepage”.

What can we do here? Let's click the question markto find out more.

“This is what shows in the search resultswhen people find your homepage.

This means this is probably what they seewhen they search for your brand name.

” Okay, so, what you can do here is change the SEOtitle and meta description of your homepage.

As we've seen before, you can use snippetvariables to determine the SEO title.

In our case, the SEO title of the homepagewould say: “Yoast” (our site title), then a page number if there is any(our page), a bullet (our separator) and “SEO for everyone” (our tagline).

You can easily adjust the SEO titleby clicking “Insert snippet variable”.

And you can always checkwhich variables are available by clicking “Need help”and then “Snippet variables”.

In the next field, you can enterthe meta description for your homepage.

You can insert snippet variables hereas well, if you like.

Now, let's have a quick lookat our own homepage snippet.

Let's just google “Yoast”.

Here it is, just below the ad.

If people click this result, they will land directly on our homepage.

Now, as you can see, we've customized our SEO title a bit.

Instead of showingthe site title “Yoast” first, we've chosen to first showthe tagline “SEO for everyone”.

And our meta description explainsin one clear sentence what we do andwhich products we offer.

The last section on this tab is called”Knowledge Graph & Schema.

org”.

That sounds rather difficult.

Is it? Well, no, not for you.

Because we take careof the difficult stuff for you.

Let's first discuss the knowledge graph.

What is it? A knowledge graph panelin Google's search results appears when you searchfor an organization or a person.

If I search for, for example, “Walt Disney Company”, this panel at the rightis the knowledge panel.

If I search for “Walt Disney” only, this is the knowledge panel.

Within the plugin you can change the settingsthat will determine what shows up here, which logo shows, and which social profilesshow in this panel.

You first have to determine whetheryou're an organization or a person.

If you're an organization, you can set a name and logo here.

The social profiles, like Facebook and Twitter, are taken care of in the Tools sectionof Yoast SEO.

And we'll come back to thatlater in this course.

If you're a person, you have to selectthe one that represents the site.

Make sure that the user profileinformation is up-to-date as this information will be usedin the search results.

You can edit this informationby clicking this link.

We'll come back to that laterin this course as well.

And.

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cool, cool, cool.

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you can also upload an image for persons.

What happens next? Well, we will automatically generateso-called JSON-LD metadata (you don't have to know exactlywhat this is right now) but we show this dataon the front page of your site.

So you won't see this anywhereon the design of your site, this will just show in the codeand it might show up in the search results.

Good luck and don't forgetto hit “Save changes” of course!.