Yoast SEO Initial Setup: First-time Configuration and Key Settings

This article is a localized edition of the Japanese original. Read the Japanese original

Yoast SEO starts outputting title tags, meta descriptions, an XML sitemap, OGP tags and more as soon as you activate it. What the initial setup adds is information the plugin cannot know on its own: the site name, who runs the site (an organization or a person), the logo, social media accounts and so on.

This article was checked against the screens of Yoast SEO 28.8 (the latest version as of November 2026; it requires WordPress 7.0 or later and PHP 7.4 or later). Item names and locations may change between versions.

Step 1: Install and activate

In the admin area, go to Plugins → Add New Plugin, search for "Yoast SEO", then install and activate it.

With WP-CLI, use the following. The plugin slug is wordpress-seo.

wp plugin install wordpress-seo --activate
wp plugin get wordpress-seo --field=version

After activation, Yoast SEO appears in the left admin menu.

Step 2: Go through the First-time configuration

Open Yoast SEO → General and select First-time configuration. The URL is wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_dashboard#/first-time-configuration. Work through the following four steps in order.

Finally, click Finish configuration.

"SEO data optimization" cannot run on sites whose WordPress environment type (WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE) is anything other than production (production). On a test environment it shows as disabled, which is not a problem.

On a site with many posts, if the optimization in the admin screen stops partway, you can run it with WP-CLI.

wp yoast index

Step 3: Items to check in the settings screen

Open Yoast SEO → Settings and you will see a list of sections on the left. These are the ones worth checking during the initial setup.

General → Site basics

General → Site representation

Review the organization or person details, the logo and the social media URLs you entered in the First-time configuration, and correct them if needed. This information is output as structured data (Schema).

General → Site features

Turn individual features on or off, such as SEO analysis, Readability analysis, XML sitemaps, Open Graph data (OGP for Facebook and others) and X card data. Most are enabled by default. If another plugin or your theme provides the same feature, turn one of them off so the output is not duplicated.

Content types

For each type, such as Homepage, Posts and Pages, choose whether to show it in search results ("Show posts in search results" and so on) and set the templates for the SEO title and meta description.

If your homepage is a static page, set its title and description in the Yoast SEO section of that page's editor.

Categories & tags

Choose whether category and tag archives appear in search results. By default they do. If you have few posts and many thin archives, hiding them is an option, but if category pages bring in traffic, keep them visible. Decide based on your site.

Advanced

On a site with a single author, the author archive is nearly the same as the homepage or the post list. In that case, disable author archives or set them not to appear in search results.

After changing settings, click Save changes at the bottom of the screen.

Step 4: Check and change settings with WP-CLI

Yoast SEO settings are stored mainly in the following options.

# View values
wp option get wpseo_titles --format=json
wp option pluck wpseo_titles separator
wp option pluck wpseo_titles website_name

# Change a single item (example: set the title separator to |)
wp option patch update wpseo_titles separator sc-pipe

wpseo_titles is an array that holds many items. If you write only some of them with wp option update wpseo_titles '{...}' --format=json, the values of the other items are lost. To change a single item, use wp option patch update. The title separator is stored not as the symbol itself but as a name such as sc-dash (-), sc-pipe (|) or sc-ndash (–).

Step 5: Verify

1. While logged out, view the source of the homepage and a post, and confirm that <title>, <meta name="description", meta tags starting with og: and application/ld+json structured data are present.
2. Open https://(your domain)/sitemap_index.xml and confirm that the XML sitemap appears.
3. In WordPress Settings → Reading, confirm that the option that discourages search engines from indexing the site is not checked. If it is checked, the site will not appear in search results regardless of your Yoast SEO settings.

Details on the XML sitemap and on adjusting how pages look when shared on social media are covered in these articles.

• Yoast SEO XML sitemap settings
• How to set up OGP and social media display in Yoast SEO

Summary

• After activation, go through SEO data optimization, Site representation, Social profiles and Personal preferences in Yoast SEO → General → First-time configuration.
• In Yoast SEO → Settings, check Site basics (website name, title separator, site image), Site features, Content types, Categories & tags and Advanced (author and date archives).
• When changing settings with WP-CLI, do not overwrite the whole array option; use wp option patch update.

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