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Yoast SEO

By Team Yoast

Description

Yoast SEO: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin

Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines.

Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone. Our plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.

Yoast SEO Free contains everything that you need to manage your SEO, and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin and its extensions unlock even more tools and functionality.

GET AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

To rank highly in search engines, you need to beat the competition. You need a better, faster, stronger website than the people who sell or do the same kinds of things as you.

Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, and has helped millions of people like you to get ahead, and to stay ahead.

TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Yoast SEO is packed full of features, designed to help visitors and search engines to get the most out of your website. Some of our favourites are:

  • Automated technical SEO improvements, like canonical URLs and meta tags.
  • Advanced XML sitemaps; making it easy for Google to understand your site structure.
  • Title and meta description templating, for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
  • An in-depth Schema.org integration that will increase your chance of getting rich results, by helping search engines to understand your content.
  • Full control over site breadcrumbs, so that users and search engines always know where they are.
  • Faster loading times for your whole website, due to an innovative way of managing data in WordPress.
  • [Premium] E-mail support for our Yoast SEO Premium users.
  • [Premium] The possibility to expand Yoast SEO with the News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions.

WRITE KILLER CONTENT WITH YOAST SEO

We know content is king, that’s why Yoast SEO is famous for its state-of-the-art content and SEO analysis. Yoast SEO gives you:

  • SEO analysis: an invaluable tool while writing SEO-friendly content with the right (focus) keyphrases in mind.
  • Readability analysis: ensures that humans and search engines can read and understand your content.
  • Full language support for: English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swedish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Turkish, Czech, Norwegian, Slovak and Greek.
  • A Google preview, which shows what your listings will look like in the search results. Even on mobile devices!
  • Innovative Schema blocks for the WordPress block editor, so that your FAQ and HowTo content can be shown directly in the search results. Plus a breadcrumbs block to guide your users.
  • [Premium] Internal linking blocks to easily improve the structure of your content. Easily add a table of contents block, a related links block, a subpages block, or siblings block! Plus, we’ll keep adding these easy-to-add blocks to improve your site structure.
  • [Premium] Social previews to show you how your content will be shown on Twitter and Facebook. Plus: Social Appearance Templates to guarantee a consistent look.
  • [Premium] The Insights tool that shows you what your text focuses on. This way you can keep your article in line with your keyphrases.
  • [Premium] Optimize your content for synonyms and related keyphrases.
  • [Premium] Optimize your article for different word forms of your keyphrases, as the singular and plural. But also different verb forms, synonyms, and related keyphrases. This makes for more natural content!
  • [Premium] Automatic internal linking suggestions: write your article and get automatic suggested posts to link to!
  • [Premium] An orphaned content filter to detect posts that have no links pointing towards them!
  • [Premium] SEO workouts to make working on your site as easy as ABC. These SEO workflows will get your site into shape in no time!

KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE

Whether you are an online entrepreneur, blogger or content creator, a developer, a (WordPress) SEO expert or a business owner, Yoast SEO helps you keep your website in perfect shape by:

  • Tuning the engine of your website, so you can work on creating great content!
  • Giving you cornerstone content and internal linking features to help you optimize your site structure in a breeze.
  • Translating your content to structured data where possible, to help search engines understand your website.
  • Helping you manage your team: with our SEO roles you can give colleagues access to specific sections of the Yoast SEO plugin.
  • [Premium] Automatically creating redirects when URLs change or when pages are deleted, and providing tools to manage or create redirects.
  • [Premium] Showing you social previews to manage the way your page is shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

TRUST THE EXPERTS

Yoast is powered by a team of expert developers, testers, software architects, and SEO consultants. They work constantly to stay at the cutting edge of WordPress SEO, and to improve the plugin with every release.

Yoast SEO is the only WordPress SEO plugin made by world-renowned SEO experts.

GET PREMIUM SUPPORT

The Yoast team offers regular support on the WordPress.org forums. But we hope you understand that we prioritize our Premium customers. This one-on-one email support is available to people who have purchased Yoast SEO Premium.

Did you know that Yoast SEO Premium contains a lot of extra features:

  • A redirect manager that prevents “404: page not found” errors
  • Optimize without worrying about over-optimization with intelligent word form recognition available in multiple languages.
  • Internal linking blocks to structure your site easily.
  • Internal linking suggestions while you’re writing.
  • Preview your content to see what it will look like in the search results and when shared on social media using the Google preview and social preview.
  • Cornerstone content checks that point search engines to your most important pages.
  • Connect Yoast SEO to Zapier to easily create zaps that instantly share your published posts with 2000+ destinations like Twitter, Facebook, and much more.

If you are serious about your WordPress SEO, install the Yoast SEO Premium plugin! Costs a little, saves a lot of time!

OUR EXTENSIONS TO FURTHER IMPROVE YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Check out these SEO add-ons by Yoast:

  • Yoast Local SEO optimizes your website for a local audience.
  • Yoast Video SEO ensures that Google understands what your video is about, increasing the chances of ranking in the video results.
  • Yoast News SEO for news websites that want to improve their visibility and performance in Google News.
  • WooCommerce SEO for all online shops that want to perform better in the search results and social media.

These extensions work fine with the free version of Yoast SEO. Of course, the premium extensions also include 24/7 support.

Oh, don’t forget: our Yoast Academy is for all entrepreneurs, bloggers, and anyone who wants to learn more about optimizing websites, improving your WordPress SEO, and if you want to take your content to the next level!

INTEGRATIONS

Yoast SEO integrates seamlessly into a range of themes and plugins. We work particularly well with:

BUG REPORTS

Do you want to report a bug for Yoast SEO? Best to do so in the WordPress SEO repository on GitHub. Please note that GitHub is not a support forum and issues will be closed if they don’t meet the bug requirements.

READ MORE

Want more information on search engine optimization and Yoast SEO? Have a look at:

Screenshots

  • The Yoast SEO plugin general meta box. You'll see this on edit post pages, for posts, pages and custom post types.
  • Example of the SEO analysis functionality.
  • Example of the readability analysis functionality.
  • Overview of site-wide SEO problems and possible improvements.
  • Control over which features you want to use.
  • Easily import SEO data from other SEO plugins like All In One SEO pack, HeadSpace2 SEO and wpSEO.de.

Installation

Starting with Yoast SEO consists of just two steps: installing and setting up the plugin. Yoast SEO is designed to work with your site’s specific needs, so don’t forget to go through the Yoast SEO configuration workout as explained in the ‘after activation’ step!

INSTALL YOAST SEO FROM WITHIN WORDPRESS

  1. Visit the plugins page within your dashboard and select ‘Add New’;
  2. Search for ‘Yoast SEO’;
  3. Activate Yoast SEO from your Plugins page;
  4. Go to ‘after activation’ below.

INSTALL YOAST SEO MANUALLY

  1. Upload the ‘wordpress-seo’ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory;
  2. Activate the Yoast SEO plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress;
  3. Go to ‘after activation’ below.

AFTER ACTIVATION

  1. You should see (a notice to start) the Yoast SEO configuration workout;
  2. Go through the configuration workout and set up the plugin for your site;
  3. You’re done!

FAQ

How do the XML Sitemaps in the Yoast SEO plugin work?

Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial for SEO, as Google can retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of a site isn’t flawless.
The sitemap index and individual sitemaps are updated automatically as you add or remove content and will include the post types you want search engines to index. Post Types marked as noindex will not appear in the sitemap. Learn more about XML Sitemaps.

How can I add my website to Google Search Console?

It is straightforward to add your website to Google Search Console.
1. Create a Google Search Console account and login into your account.
2. Click ‘Add a property’ under the search drop-down.
3. Enter your website URL in the box and click ‘Continue’.
4. Click the arrow next to ‘HTML tag’ to expand the option.
5. Copy the meta tag.
6. Log in to your WordPress website.
7. Click on ‘SEO’ in the dashboard.
8. Click on ‘General’.
9. Click on the ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab.
10. Paste the code in the Google field and click ‘Save Changes’.
11. Go back to Google Search Console and click ‘Verify’.

If you want more details steps, please visit our article on our help center.

How do I implement Yoast SEO breadcrumbs?

The steps below are a temporary solution as manual edits made to theme files may be overwritten with future theme updates. Please contact the theme developer for a permanent solution. We’ve written an article about the importance of breadcrumbs for SEO.

To implement the breadcrumbs function in Yoast SEO, you will have to edit your theme. We recommend that prior to any editing of the theme files, a backup is taken. Your host provider can help you take a backup.
Copy the following code into your theme where you want the breadcrumbs to be. If you are not sure, you will need to experiment with placement:

<?php
if ( function_exists( 'yoast_breadcrumb' ) ) {
    yoast_breadcrumb( '<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>' );
}
?>

Common places where you could place your breadcrumbs are inside your single.php and/or page.php file just above the page’s title. Another option that makes it really easy in some themes is by just pasting the code in header.php at the very end.

In most non-WooTheme themes, this code snippet should not be added to your functions.php file.
Alternatively, you can manually add the breadcrumb shortcode to individual posts or pages: [wpseo_breadcrumb]

If you need more details or a step by step guide, read our Implementation guide for Yoast SEO breadcrumbs.

How do I noindex URLS?

Yoast SEO provides multiple options for setting a URL or group of URLs to noindex. Read more about how to do this in this guide.

Google shows the wrong description, how do I fix this?

If you’ve crafted nice meta descriptions for your blog posts, nothing is more annoying than Google showing another description for your site completely in the search result snippet.

Possible causes could be:
1. wrong description in code
2. Google cache is outdated
3. Search term manipulation
4. Google ignored the meta description

You can read more here on how to solve the issue with the wrong description.

How often is Yoast SEO updated?

Yoast SEO is updated every two weeks. If you want to know why, please read this post on why we release every two weeks!

How do I get support?

As our free plugin is used by millions of people worldwide, we cannot offer you all one on one support. If you have trouble with the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin, you can get help on the support forums here at wordpress.org or by checking out our help center at yoast.com/help/.

The plugins you buy at Yoast are called ‘premium plugins’ (even if Premium isn’t in its name) and include a complete year of free updates and premium support. This means you can contact our support team if you have any questions about that plugin.

Read more on how to get support

I have a different question than listed here

Your question has most likely been answered on our help center: yoast.com/help/.

Reviews

No way to remove “SEO” from the menu for non-admins.

January 14, 2022
Trash plugin. Absolutely no way to remove the stupid "SEO" with their logo from the back-end menu for non-admins and custom user roles. I literally tried everything. The new ridiculous workouts are awful. Disabling all these has no effect: wpseo bulk edit x wpseo edit advanced metadata x wpseo manage options x wpseo manage redirects x Toxic plugin. Over the years, it has become more and more aggressive with its SPAM. Even white label branding for WP can't remove their crap once and for all. I'm giving this review because I tried for months, and I'm pissed with them.

17.9 Breaking Blocks

January 13, 2022
Stylesheet yoast-seo-metabox-css-css was not properly added. is an error that crops up when using some of my custom blocks. Once I disable Yoast they work as expected but I need to have Yoast for SEO. Please fix this soon as I must revert to an older version of Yoast in the meantime.

Hands-on Free SEO Solution

January 8, 2022
When considering SEO for a WordPress project, most of the times I end up relying on Yoast. The free version works out of the box. Just click "activate", set a few things, and you're good to go. It's a must if you want to share your articles on social media and want to control how they display there (Open Graph). The interface is straightforward and intuitive, it makes you aware of what needs to be taken care of to improve your SEO, right there in the editor. It goes beyond that by giving you great indicators to improve your content for readability and SEO. There are a few interesting and creative alternatives out there, but this plugin has been around for a while and it's a safe bet, for sure. The free version might be enough for most uses. It works. I haven't tried the paid version yet.

Meh. There are better plugins

December 29, 2021
I used Yoast Premium for a long time. Found another plugin thats code weighed a lot less and offered a lot more, even in their free version and I love their premium version. I have since deleted Yoast, but the plugin leaves behind a TON of data in your Database. I would avoid using this plugin, even just trying it, as it will just bloat your database and not clean up after itself.

GREAT TOOL KIVUHUB

December 21, 2021
Thank you for the contents. our company used these tips and we got great result all because we followed your recommendation now we have a great website , thank you all for contributing to make KIVUHUB the best,
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Contributors & Developers

“Yoast SEO” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Yoast SEO” has been translated into 51 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Yoast SEO” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

17.9

Release Date: January 11th, 2022

Yoast SEO 17.9 is now available! Yoast SEO now comes with a keyphrase tracking tool powered by Wincher that lets you monitor your keyphrases, straight from the plugin! Make sure to try out this new keyphrase tracking feature and let us know what you think. Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 17.9 in our release post in English or our release post in Spanish!

Enhancements:

  • Introduces a keyphrase position tracking tool that gives insight into how your content ranks in the search results. Powered by Wincher.
  • Improves Japanese text analysis results by adding functionality to segment Japanese texts into sentences and words.
  • Adapts relevant assessments to count text length in characters instead of words in Japanese.
  • Completes the readability analysis for Japanese by adding the transition words and sentence beginnings assessments.
  • Improves keyword detection for Japanese by adding a function words list.
  • Adapts Keyphrase in title scoring criteria for Japanese: the exact match keyphrase is not required for Japanese unless the keyphrase is enclosed in double quotes.
  • Disables the Keyphrase in slug assessment for Japanese due to currently being unable to match keyphrases written in Japanese characters in slugs written in Latin characters.
  • Improves the accuracy of the Estimated Reading Time results for Japanese.
  • Adapts the recommended meta description length and meta description preview limit for Japanese.
  • Improves the Workouts overview for mobile screens.
  • Makes sure we don’t output the same sameAs URL twice on Person and Organization.
  • Adds “Blog Post” / BlogPosting as a potential Schema Article type.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when using PHP 8.1.
  • Fixes a bug where the og:image:type meta would not be output correctly. Props to @dodomorandi.
  • Fixes a bug where the incoming link count of a post would not return to zero if all incoming links were removed.
  • Fixes a bug where the meta description would get trimmed to an empty string if the text doesn’t have any space. Props to @waviaei.
  • Fixes a bug where Link keyphrase assessment would not find a match when the keyphrase is enclosed in double quotes.
  • Fixes a bug where <br> tags with attributes in the text would not be converted to paragraph tags. As a result some long paragraphs in the text might not have been highlighted in the Paragraph length assessment.

Other:

  • Improves compatibility with PHP 8.1 by adding validations and handling deprecations.
  • Reverts the removal of the deprecated WPSEO_Frontend class.
  • Changes the font size of the alerts from 14px to 13px.

17.8

Release Date: December 14th, 2021

Yoast SEO 17.8 is out now and ready for you to download. In this release, we fix a number of bugs and added a few enhancements for you to enjoy! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 17.8 in our release post in English or our release post in Spanish!

Enhancements:

  • Improves the user direction in the configuration workout.
  • Adds a sleep interval to the WP CLI index command to limit server load while this command is running. Props to roborourke.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixes a bug where on small screens the advanced setting’s search engine follow checkbox would have a misplaced center.
  • Fixes a bug where the styling of the introduction dialog in Elementor would be broken due to changes in Elementor.
  • Fixes a bug where the reading time functionality for languages other than English would incorrectly output English reading speed values.
  • Fixes a bug where certain text strings in the Google, Facebook and Twitter previews would not be translated.
  • Fixes a bug where the state of indexation was not persisted when switching between workouts and the workouts page.
  • Fixes a bug where the Workouts page wouldn’t display translations.

Other:

  • Fixes some styling issues in the configuration workout.
  • Prevents SEO managers from changing the site description in the configuration workout.
  • Optimizes and compresses several .png images to reduce their size. Props to lowwebtech.

Earlier versions

For the changelog of earlier versions, please refer to the changelog on yoast.com.

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Issues resolved in last two months:

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