Yoast: Local, Video, News SEO

What does Yoast Local SEO do?

If you own a local business, this is a crucial moment to increase your online presence on a local level. Because now more than ever, your customers’ search focuses on local results. So, that makes ranking high in their local search results of the utmost importance. Are you not on top of their search results? Then you’re losing customers to the competition in your area.

• It tells Google everything it needs to know — Google needs information about your site in order to place you in local search results. It needs information like: Name of your business, Type of business, business info, Physical location, Opening hours. But just putting this information on your contact page won’t do the trick. You’ll need this data in a specific format – Schema.org – as well, so Google sees it on every single page.
• Easily add all your business details — The Local SEO plugin allows you to easily add all your business details in one place. And it then takes care of all the needed technical stuff under the hood. What technical stuff? Address and opening hours you add to pages are automatically output in Schema.org format. Showing Google Maps instantly on your website, including a route planner, KML File generation and automatically adding these to your XML sitemap. So no worries if this technical local SEO stuff sounds a bit confusing: the Local SEO plugin fixes it for you.
• It optimizes your local SEO for one or more locations — Do you have more than 1 physical location? The Local SEO plugin optimizes your Google listing for all of them, so people see the nearest option for them pop up in their search results. You can also add a store finder on your website. Just upload a CSV file with all the details or type them in in WordPress. And of course, everything is responsive, so it looks just as professional on mobile: the main device people use for local search.
• Easily create a full-fledged contact page — In just a few clicks, your contact page looks perfect and you even get an awesome embedded Google Map. The Local SEO plugin helps you to: Embed Google Maps so people can get directions (make sure you set up your Google account correctly). And automatically show your up-to-date opening hours. No technical knowledge needed. It’s done in just a few clicks!

Putting it to use

It’s a breeze to implement, and there’s very little setup required. Install the plugin, activate your license, input your business’ information, and pop the shortcode into your contact page(s).

It will do all the markup for you, create a geo sitemap and KML file (especially useful with multiple locations), and even submit them to Google.

It just used our site’s existing styles, so it looked nice and shiny in action.

Watch video for Local SEO plugin setup

Yoast video SEO

What does Yoast Video SEO do?

The Yoast Video SEO plugin helps you drive search traffic to videos on your website. It automates technical SEO for the video to improve your video’s performance and improves the ranking or visibility!

• Help Google uncover your video — Getting great results for your site in the video search results in Google is just as easy. Simply add the video, title, and description and you are good to go! Remember, comments and video length helps you to appear on the top of the ranks. 
• Faster loading times — Ensures faster loading times for your pages by utilizing asynchronous JavaScript for video delivery.
• Responsive sizing — Make sure that your video fits perfectly on desktops, phones and tablets. No need to spend hours tinkering with code or browser testing. 
• Video previews — Ensure that video previews appear properly any time someone shares your page on Facebook or Slack, through added OpenGraph tag
• Custom thumbnails — Includes custom thumbnails for all your video results in search, and preview how it will look before publishing
• Automatic XML Video sitemaps — This automatic Video sitemap, adds on to the XML sitemaps generated by Yoast SEO
• MediaRSS enhancement
• Platform support — Includes support for many major video platforms, including Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia and VideoPress.

Yoast news SEO

The News SEO plugin for the Yoast SEO helps you do all the things that allow you to optimize your site for Google News. It creates XML News Sitemaps so Google can pick up on new articles as soon as possible, and it helps you optimize some of the more advanced XML News sitemap options like stock tickers.

How to configure News SEO

To set up News SEO, go to the admin dashboard of your website and click SEO -> News SEO.

• Log in to your WordPress website.
  When you’re logged in, you will be in your ‘Dashboard’.
• Click on ‘SEO’.
  On the left-hand side, you will see a menu. In that menu, click on ‘SEO’.
• Click on ‘News SEO’.
  The ‘SEO’ settings will expand providing you additional options. Click on ‘News SEO’.

• You will see the following settings
  

Google News publication name

This is the name that appears when your news items are featured in Google News. This must match the name exactly as it appears in news.google.com.

Post types to include in news sitemap

News SEO will list all post types you have on your website, so you can pick which ones should be included in the News Sitemap. You should only pick the post types that actually contain your news.

Using News SEO

Once you set up News SEO, you can start using it for your articles. While writing your article, you can find the News SEO settings in the Yoast SEO sidebar.

Yoast News SEO in the sidebar

Or, after writing your article, scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box and click on the plugin icon on the side, and then the Google News tab.

Exclude this post from Google News

You can choose per post if it should be excluded from Google News by marking the Exclude this post from Google News option. This will pull the article off of the sitemap. Selecting this option will make sure your article won’t appear in a Google News search. Please note that by selecting this option, it’s only expected that it will prevent your article from appearing in Google News. The article is still expected to appear in a regular Google search.