Every page and post has an SEO box on its edit screen, underneath the main content area. It controls how that one page shows up in Google search results, and what it looks like when someone shares its link on Facebook or X. You'll only ever see this per-page box — there's no separate SEO settings menu in the sidebar for you to find, and that's intentional. Everything you need for day-to-day editing lives right here, on the page itself.
The SEO title is the blue, clickable headline shown in search results — it can read differently from the page's on-screen title. The Meta description is the couple of sentences underneath it: your chance to say why someone should click through. A coloured bar under each field shows whether the length is in a good range as you type.
Leave either one blank and Yoast fills it in automatically — the SEO title becomes the page's title followed by "| Brentwood College School", and the meta description is generated from the page's own content. Writing your own gives you control over the wording searchers actually see.
Important
The same preview also shows the page's web address (its slug), and you can edit that too. Only change the address of a page that's brand new or not yet shared anywhere — changing it on a page that's already live breaks any links pointing to the old address. The guide on fixing broken links covers how to redirect one if you do need to change it.
The Focus Keyphrase field sits at the top of the SEO tab. It's the main word or short phrase you'd want someone to type into Google to find this page — for example boarding school Vancouver Island for the Admissions page, or Grade 10 course selection for a course page.
Once you've typed one in, Yoast reads through the page and lists suggestions underneath — whether the phrase appears in your title, your first paragraph and the meta description, among other checks. Each suggestion is marked green, orange or red: green means it's covered, orange or red means it's worth a look.
Not every page needs one. It's most useful for pages people search for directly — admissions, academics, key programme pages. For a page that mainly exists for people already on the site, feel free to leave it blank.
Click the Social tab (the share icon) in the same box. It has two sections — Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) — each with its own Title, Description and Image. Open a section and click its preview to edit the title and description, or click the image to replace it, the same way you'd set a Featured image.
Leave a section blank and it falls back automatically to the SEO title and meta description from the SEO tab, and to the page's Featured image — so for most pages you don't need to touch this tab at all. Fill it in only when you want the shared version to read differently: a punchier headline for Facebook, say, or an image cropped for sharing rather than for the page's own banner.
The SEO and Readability tabs each carry a small circle that changes colour as you write: red means needs improvement, orange means okay, green means good. Click either tab to see the full list of suggestions behind that score.
Readability looks at how easy the page is to read — sentence and paragraph length, use of subheadings — separately from SEO, which looks at the focus keyphrase and how search-friendly the page is.
Note
A perfect green score isn't the goal — treat it as a helpful nudge, not a requirement. Write for people first, and use a suggestion only where it genuinely improves the page.