Yoast SEO meta box (classic editor) – Yoast SEO for WordPress training

We're going to take a closer lookat the Yoast SEO meta box.

If you're using the classic WordPress editor, it shows upbelow the post you're currently writing.

We're on the first vertical tab, which allows you to do a whole lot of thingsto improve your SEO.

So let's dive right into it! At the top, you see your snippet preview.

This gives you a preview of what yoursearch result may look like in Google so you can make adjustments to it.

Note, that it's not definitely what you will see in the search results, because Google can change things – and often does -and we can't influence that.

But by putting some serious effort intoediting your snippet, you can get great results.

You see here that you havethe title of the page, the slug and the meta description.

You can toggle between desktopand mobile.

So, if you clickthe “edit snippet” button, you can edit the SEO title, slug and meta description.

So you can make a custom title, shorten the slug, and add a meta description, which you should ALWAYS do.

We'll give you a lot of advice on howto actually do this in the next module in this course.

Below the snippet editor, you'll find a readability analysis.

And in this analysis, we'll tell you whether you're doingeverything well when it comes to writingan understandable text or whether it could usesome improvements, or maybe even that there arebig problems with it.

We'll always give youa bit of specific feedback, which tells youif you're doing things right or wrong and what you should do to make surethat you're doing things better.

In this case for example the paragraph length, the reading ease and the subheading distribution are all great.

But the author could've used more transition words to make sure that sentences are clearly related to each other.

So that is an improvementhe/she could make.

And there is nothingwhich is a real big problem so there are no red bullets here.

So in general the readability analysis is positive here.

Below the readability analysis, you'll see the optionof adding your focus keyphrase, in this case “email marketing”.

Filling this in allows the plugin to givefeedback on your focus keyphrase, just like the readability analysis does for your copy.

We'll dive into the feedback in more detailin the next module but here you see as wellthat there are some problems, some things that could be improvedand some good results.

Below the focus keyphrase, you'll see the option of adding a related keyphrase.

You can only do thisif you have Yoast SEO Premium.

Related keyphrases allow you to optimizeyour post for more than one keyphrase.

You'll get feedback for eachof these keyphrases, individually.

Now, the next collapsible header iscornerstone content.

If the post you're writing playsa really important role on your website, you can mark your contentas cornerstone content.

We've discussed cornerstone contentin the previous Yoast Academy training video: they are your most important articles and if you tick this box, the analysis will be a bit stricter so you're sure you're writinga very well-optimized post.

Now, if you're using the free plugin, that's all there is to see.

If you're using Premium, however, there's an additional header, called Insights.

Under this header, you can seewhat words and combinations of words you use most frequently in your text.

This gives you an indicationof what you focus on in your content.

If your keyphrase doesn't show up, you may still have some work to do.

As we can see here, “email marketing”, the focus keyphrase, is actually the most prominent wordor word combination in this case in this article so that's a good thing.

If we proceed to the Social tab, you'll see that there is a Facebook preview and a Twitter preview.

And this simply allows youto upload an image for Facebook; to edit the Facebook titleand to edit the Facebook description, so that you can managewhat your result will look like on Facebook.

And the same thing applies to Twitter, so it's exactly the same thing.

So that's nothing too difficult.

Now, the Advanced tab allows you to edit some things and you should really only do thatif you know what you're doing anyway, because this can break a lot of things.

The first one is simply indicating whether you want the search enginesto show this post in the search results, there are three options here: you can either say”Follow the default settings”, which we'll show you how to editin the plugin settings later in this training or you can say “Yes” or”'No” and make surethat you don't follow the default.

So if you want to do something differentthan the default, you have to be here.

You can also indicate whether searchengines should follow links on this post, and we're going to go into why you shoulddo this or not do this in another lesson, but know that you can do it here.

And you can put in some advanced settingsfor meta robots using the dropdown menu.

You should really only do thiswhen you know what you're doing, so if you don't, don't touch it.

And lastly, you can fill in a canonical URL.

If you want to know how that works, check out the “Under the hoodof Yoast SEO” module right at the very end of this course.

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