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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.
  • [Premium] New! Yoast SEO Premium comes with wide-ranging crawl settings that help you improve how search engines crawl your site.

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.

Blocks

This plugin provides 2 blocks.

  • Yoast SEO
  • Yoast SEO

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 first-time configuration 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 first-time configuration;
  2. Go through this configuration 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

Breaks my site

June 16, 2022
The Plugin is installed on my site quite a while but when I activate it, it redirects all URLS to one old Blogpost. When I recreate the permalinks it is fixed only for a while.. 🙁

Solid SEO Improvement, Traffic Increased

June 8, 2022
Since installation of this software I have nothing but praise. Noticed traffic increased on my posts, and it provides an excellent guide on what to do to improve your settings. Combine this with Monster Insights and you can really gain organic traffic easily. Went from getting 4 views per day on my best days to hitting 120 hits a day on post days. This did take SEO work efforts on my behalf and going all the way with every setting. My posts easily get 35 hits in their first month, and my better content exceeds 100 in the first month. And things are still improving! Note: Make sure to get others to endorse your site by posting your URL on theirs. Helps with SEO boosting. Also, don't forget to post your content in more than your site (i.e. Youtube, social media, etc.). That helps a ton!

I remember when it WAS a Great plugin.

June 2, 2022
Not sure what happened with these guys, I remember when Yoast was first released and it was amazing, still seems to be amazing BUT.... you guys should win an award for the most ads/nags screens ever introduced into a plugin. Last time I used Yoast it had "soft" upsells to premium, now, anything you click, anywhere in wordpress where "Yoast" is associated there is constant nag screens and upsells. This plugin is the classic example of "if it is free, YOU are the product". It is so bad that someone actually wrote a plugin "Hide SEO Bloat" to remove all the nasty bloat/ads that saturates your wordpress. I am all for supporting developers but this is ridiculous in my opinion. 😳 There is probably more code to inject their ads then what is written for the actual plugin....
Read all 27,480 reviews

Contributors & Developers

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

Contributors

“Yoast SEO” has been translated into 52 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

19.1

Release Date: June 14th, 2022

Yoast SEO 19.1 is out today! In this release, we’ve rolled out some improvements that make the content and SEO analyses more flexible. We’ve also expanded our range of crawl settings in Premium. Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 19.1 in our release post in English or our release post in Spanish!

Enhancements:

  • Improves text analysis by splitting text on full-stop only when the next sentence is preceded by a whitespace.
  • Prompts users to set up their site in order to take advantage of all SEO features.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixes a bug where the “Check links to this URL” option on admin bar menu would lead to an error page on setups with home URL different from the site URL. Props to @suascat.
  • Fixes a bug where the network setting for the crawl cleanup feature would default to Disable when the super admin saved settings before upgrading/installing Premium.
  • Fixes a bug which caused the Spanish transition word para ilustrar to not be recognized by the transition words assessment.

Other:

  • Adds an informative error message to the steps of the First-time configuration should an error occur.
  • Adds dismissable weekly webinar promo banners to Yoast settings pages & block/Elementor editor sidebars.
  • Adds new disabled toggles to the Crawl settings tab in the General page.
  • Improves handling of OAuth errors in the Wincher integration and clears refresh tokens that seem to be invalid.

19.0

Release Date: May 31st, 2022

Say hi to Yoast SEO 19.0! This release helps make your sitemaps available to Bing, we’ve updated Yoast SEO to add your XML sitemap link(s) to your robots.txt file — if you want. Plus: we’ve fixed a couple of bugs with Elementor and our readability analyses. Happy updating! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 19.0 in our release post in English or our release post in Spanish!

Enhancements:

  • Following a change of policy by Bing, we now reference the XML sitemap in the robots.txt file to make it discoverable for search engines.
  • Changes Disallow: /wp-admin/ to Disallow: in the default robots.txt file to follow our best-practice guide.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixes a bug where an error in saving the Site representation step of the First-time configuration would not block the advancement to the next step.
  • Fixes a bug where editing an existing post created in the Block editor in Elementor would result in an analysis result discrepancy.
  • Fixes a bug where items in lists were not excluded for the readability assessment that checks whether consecutive sentences do not begin with the same words.
  • Fixes a bug where outdated information is shown in the First-time configuration Social profiles step
  • Fixes a bug where saving an invalid organization name in the First-time configuration would fail without feedback.
  • Fixes a bug where the schema would not be updated with the new logo when the user changed it via the First-time Configuration.
  • Fixes a bug where the titles of the steps in the First-time configuration would not be translated.
  • Fixes a bug where users would be able to leave a step containing errors by clicking another step’s edit button.

Other:

  • Adds a Crawl settings tab in the General page with an upsell to Premium.
  • Adds a Redirects page with an upsell to Premium.
  • Deprecates the configuration workout classes.
  • Sets the WordPress tested up to version to 6.0.

Earlier versions

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

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Support

Issues resolved in last two months:

335 out of 405

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