Time to release Yoast SEO 20.9! In this release, we’ve added a new option for the Wincher integration, plus the regular round of enhancements, improvements, and fixes.
Enhancing the Wincher rank tracking integration
A while ago, Yoast SEO and Wincher joined hands to allow you to track your website’s ranking status in Google straight from the plugin. Wincher is a third-party tool that offers advanced rank tracking, in-depth keyword analysis, and other features that can help improve your website’s visibility in search engines.
The Wincher integration in Yoast SEO provides an easy way to track how your content is performing right from the post editor. You get critical ranking data in one place, which helps you monitor your website’s performance. On Wincher’s website, you’ll get many extra options to go in-depth with your data. You can also find great opportunities for untapped keywords!
In Yoast SEO 20.9, we’ve added a Wincher widget to the dashboard. This shows your top keywords added to Wincher via Yoast SEO. It also doubles as a connection button, so if you haven’t connected to your Wincher account, yet, you can from this widget.
Get quick insights into the performance of your most important keyphrases
Improvements in Yoast SEO 20.9
In the Crawl optimization settings, you’ll find a new pattern to help you prevent crawling from internal search results. We’ve added the line "/page/*/?s=" to the robots.txt. The asterisk * represents any numeric value, while ?s= is most websites’ typical query parameter to identify internal search URLs.
This addition will help improve websites’ crawlability by ensuring search engines do not index unnecessary pages, such as internal search result pages. This can help consolidate the website’s crawl budget, declutter the search results, and improve the website’s overall SEO performance.
Background indexing
Our latest update introduces scheduled indexing that creates the necessary database structure without requiring you to click on the SEO optimization button in Yoast SEO. With this feature, even websites not optimized previously will slowly receive automatic optimization of their databases. This process will be done gradually in chunks to ensure a smooth experience. Indexing might take some time for larger sites, but the scheduled indexation feature ensures that websites are continually optimized without user intervention.
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.9!
Yoast SEO 20.9 is out today, so download the latest update of your favorite SEO plugin. In this release, we expanded the possibilities of the Wincher integration. In addition, we did some regular bug fixes and made some enhancements to our database system.
Here’s another release of our SEO plugin, Yoast SEO 20.8. We’ve improved our SEO analysis in this release and fixed several issues. In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new column in the post overview to quickly see your posts’ inclusive language scores.
Improved language analysis
Content is vital for successful SEO. Yoast SEO’s language tools assist in creating quality articles. The update to the SEO analysis improves the keyphrase density assessment feedback. The feedback used to be specific to the focus keyphrase, but it now refers to the keyphrase in general, making the feedback more comprehensive and valuable.
Additionally, this update improves the accuracy of content analysis by excluding texts within textarea tags from the analysis. This exclusion ensures that the analysis is based solely on relevant text and produces more accurate results.
Monitoring your inclusive language scores
Not long ago, we introduced the inclusive language analysis. The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO works similarly to our readability and SEO analyses. It uses red, orange, and green lights to guide you. You can write any post or page as usual, and the inclusive language feature will assess your content.
The feature provides feedback divided into categories such as age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. This valuable feedback helps you improve your content, making it appealing to a broader audience. You can create more relevant and inclusive content that resonates better with your readers or viewers through the inclusive language feature.
With the latest version of Yoast SEO Premium, we have introduced a new feature that simplifies finding and improving your content in WordPress. You’ll now notice an additional column in the post overview, represented by a heart in a speech bubble icon. Different colors signal if a post needs work on the inclusive language part. Green, of course, is good. You can filter your posts list by clicking the icon, making the entire process even more straightforward. This feature aims to simplify your workflow and streamline your content management experience.
Quickly find the status of inclusive language use in your content
Bugfixes in Yoast SEO 20.8
This Yoast SEO update resolves several issues. First, it fixes several bugs in our indexable database system. These fixes make the system more robust. We’ve also fixed a bug where the SEO and Readability score icon would not show a sad emoji when the post was empty or there was no set keyphrase. These issues have been addressed, and Yoast SEO offers a better user experience.
Security fix in Local SEO 15.0
We’ve improved the security of our Local SEO plugin. This update addresses a security vulnerability that the WordPress security service Patchstack and our security/development team identified and reported. With this update, we have addressed and fixed this issue. We recommend that all users update their Local SEO plugins to this latest version to stay protected from potential security threats.
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.8
Yoast 20.8 is out today, ready for you to download. In this release, we fixed several bugs, added some enhancements, and brought a new feature to Yoast SEO Premium, bringing inclusive language insights into the post overview of your WordPress site.
Every two weeks, we bring you a new release of Yoast SEO. Today is no different! In Yoast SEO 20.7, we bring you a round of fixes and enhancements. In this week’s Yoast SEO Premium release, we’ve added a new feature to help you discover your all-important cornerstone content articles in the WordPress post overview.
Yoast SEO Premium: Find your cornerstone content quickly
As you know, cornerstone content is the most critical content on your website. They are typically lengthy, informative pages that cover a topic from all angles. Cornerstone content helps to establish your website’s authority and expertise in your field, and it usually attracts a lot of traffic over time.
However, creating and managing high-quality cornerstone content can be daunting, and that’s where Yoast SEO comes in. Yoast SEO helps you optimize your cornerstone content for search engines, ensuring that it ranks well in the search results and attracts the right traffic. By leveraging Yoast SEO’s guidance and best practices, you can create compelling content that drives traffic and builds authority and reputation.
In Yoast SEO Premium 20.7, we’ve made it easier to find your cornerstone in the post overview of WordPress. An additional column, identified by the pyramid icon, highlights which posts you marked as cornerstones in Yoast SEO. Of course, you can filter the list by clicking on the pyramid icon.
In the screenshot, you’ll also notice the numbers and the icons with arrows pointing in and out of a document. This link counter tracks how many internal links point to a post and how many internal links point away from the post to other articles on your site.
Track the number of internal links going to and from your cornerstone content, plus a new column for easily recognizing them
Zapier integration ends today
In Yoast SEO 20.6, we gave you a heads-up about the upcoming end of the Zapier integration. With today’s release of Yoast SEO 20.7, we are formally ending support for our Zapier integration. This will impact you if you rely on the integration, as existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working for you if you update to version 20.7 or higher.
Yoast SEO academy is an excellent resource if you want to learn how to optimize your site for search engines and to drive more traffic to it. And the best part is that you get free access to all the courses when you sign up for Yoast SEO Premium!
With Yoast SEO academy, you can access a comprehensive library of SEO courses and training materials. These resources cover keyword research, site structure, content creation, and more. You’ll learn the theory and practical application of SEO strategies essential for higher search engine rankings.
In Yoast SEO 20.7, we’ve made accessing and discovering all these excellent educational materials easier. You can find all your SEO courses in the new academy section in one spot. And with access included in Yoast SEO Premium, there’s no reason not to take advantage of this valuable resource!
Yoast SEO 20.7 is out now
Yoast SEO 20.7 is available for download as of now, so go get it! In this release, you can find several fixes and enhancements. In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new column to the post overview in WordPress to help you find your cornerstone content easily.
Get ready for another release of Yoast SEO! Our team has been working hard to bring you new features, enhancements, and bug fixes that help improve Yoast SEO. In Yoast SEO 20.6, we’re introducing a readability assessment that helps you avoid using center-aligned text in your content. Plus, we have other upgrades that enhance your favorite SEO plugin. Update now!
A new readability assessment: don’t center-align text
To provide the best reading experience to users, we have added a new readability assessment. This warning reminds you not to use center-aligned text in your content, as this can make your content harder to read.
Text aligned to the center can create readability, usability, and user experience problems. This is due to the uneven spacing between words, making it difficult for readers to stay engaged with the text flow. As a result, it is hard to identify the start and end of each line when the text is centered. Thus, making it challenging for people to keep track of their reading.
Yoast SEO recommends avoiding center-aligned text in your content. This way, reading your content is much easier, and your page layout has the best user experience.
Yoast SEO will give you a heads-up if you are using too much center-aligned text
A heads-up: we’re deprecating the Zapier integration
Yoast SEO users depending on the Zapier integration, should take note of the upcoming changes. Here’s a short timeline of what’s happening:
Starting May 2, 2023, the Yoast SEO integration with Zapier will be soft-deprecated. Existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will only work for users who haven’t updated to version 20.7 of Yoast SEO. If you have updated to version 20.7 or higher, your Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working.
On May 9th, 2023, support for the integration with Zapier will end with Yoast SEO 20.7.
To continue using Yoast SEO with Zapier, it’s recommended to check your Zaps and identify which ones will be affected by the end of support. By configuring your API calls using Webhooks by Zapier, you can continue to use Yoast SEO’s features in your Zaps. Please check out our help documentation for guidance if you have any questions.
WooCommerce SEO 15.7: Product identifiers now for grouped products
In WooCommerce, a grouped product is a type of product that allows you to group multiple simple products and sell them as a single item. To help you improve the metadata of your grouped products, we now support these in the SKU and product identifiers assessment in WooCommerce SEO 15.7.
In the WooCommerce SEO analyses, we’ll check if your (grouped) products come with SKUs or product identifiers. Adding these makes it easier for search engines to understand your products as this information is passed via Product structured data for them to use.
Yoast SEO 20.6 is out today!
We hope you’re excited about the new version of Yoast SEO! With all the recent bug fixes, enhancements, and the new readability assessment, this release will help you take your website’s SEO and user experience to the next level.
We just released Yoast SEO 20.5, which has many enhancements and (security) fixes! Our team has been working hard to implement these changes to enhance your experience and help make your SEO journey smoother. In this post, we’ll tell you all about the latest release.
Improvements in Yoast SEO 20.5
One of the main enhancements in this release is the updated Google SERP preview. We’ve updated our mobile and desktop snippet previews to align with Google’s current styling. This is important because you can now check how enticing your snippets look. It also helps you to see if you’ve optimized them properly for the current Google search results pages.
The updated preview mirrors Google’s current design again
We’ve updated our database indexing system. This could contain orphaned items due to posts, terms, or users being deleted while Yoast SEO was deactivated. Every time a plugin is activated, we run a cleanup action. This helps to ensure the database table is as clean and efficient as possible.
We’ve also improved the recognition of keyphrases starting with a period, such as “.net developer,” in the keyphrase in title assessment. This ensures that Yoast SEO can accurately read and assess your content, even when punctuation marks are involved.
We’ve addressed several bugs in this release. One of those led to a fatal error when upgrading Yoast SEO while also having Local SEO active. We’ve also improved how we tidy up our database records when users are deleted. We’ve also dropped compatibility with outdated PHP versions, ensuring you use the most up-to-date and secure software for your website.
Finally, we’ve made some modifications to the first-time configuration to highlight the availability of a free webinar to get the most out of Yoast SEO. This webinar is there to help new Yoast SEO users find their way around the plugin and get started on their SEO journey. They’ll have the chance to watch a dedicated walk through video and have a live Q&A session with some of our experts!
Security fixes
In Yoast SEO 20.5, we’ve also improved the security of our plugins. This update addresses several security vulnerabilities identified and reported by the WordPress security service Patchstack and our security/development team. We take security very seriously and are committed to ensuring our products are secure for all users.
With this update, we have addressed and fixed these issues. We recommend that all users update their plugins to this latest version as soon as possible to stay protected from any potential security threats.
Big thanks to Patchstack for promptly identifying and reporting this issue. We also thank our senior developers, Paolo Scala, Leonidas Milosis, and Enrico Battocchi, for finding and resolving these issues. Our users’ security is our top priority, and we will continue working tirelessly to ensure our product remains safe and secure.
We strive to be comprehensive in our security measures, and we acknowledge that we sometimes might miss some issues. This is where we rely on you, our users and the security community to assist us by reporting any security concerns found to us directly. We have a security program with guidelines for submission and rewards for cooperation. We encourage everyone to help us uphold the integrity of our products and keep our community secure.
Yoast SEO 20.5: Update now!
Yoast SEO 20.5 is available today. In this release, we made several improvements and brought our Google to the latest UX changes from the SERPs. We’ve also fixed some security-related issues to make the plugin more secure.
Today, we’re very excited to be releasing Yoast SEO 20.4. With this release, we’re bringing our crawl optimization feature to Yoast SEO Free. With this feature, you can improve your SEO and reduce your carbon footprint with just a few clicks. This blog post will tell you about this feature and why we’ve brought it to Yoast SEO.
Before we explain this Yoast SEO feature, it’s good to start with a quick reminder of what crawling is. Search engines like Google or Bing use crawlers, also known as bots, to find your website, read it and save its content to their index. They go around the internet 24/7 to ensure the content saved in its index is as up-to-date as possible. Depending on the number of changes you make on your website and how important search engines deem your site, the crawler comes around more or less often.
That’s nice, but did you know crawlers do an incredible amount of unnecessary crawling?
Let’s reduce unnecessary crawling
As you can imagine, search engine crawlers don’t just visit your website but every single one they can find. The incredible number of websites out there keeps them quite busy. In fact, bots are responsible for around 30% of all web traffic. This uses lots of electricity, and a lot of that crawling isn’t necessary at all. This is where our crawl optimization feature comes in. With just a few simple changes, you can tell search engines like Google which pages or website elements they can skip — making it easier to visit the right pages on your website while reducing the energy wasted on unnecessary bot traffic.
The carbon footprint of your website
You might be wondering why we want to help you reduce the energy consumption of your website. Does it make that much of a difference? The answer is yes! Regardless of the size of your website, the fact is that your website has a carbon footprint. Internet usage and digital technology are two massive players in pollution and energy consumption.
Every interaction on your website results in electricity being used. For instance, when someone visits your website, their browser needs to make an HTTP request to your server, and that server needs to return the necessary information. On the other side, the browser also needs the power to process data and present the page to the visitor. The energy needed to complete these requests might be small, but it adds up when you consider all the interactions on your website. Similar to when a visitor lands on your site, crawlers or bots also make these requests to your server that cost energy. Considering the amount of bot traffic (30% of web traffic), reducing the number of irrelevant pages and other resources crawled by search engines is worth it.
Take control of what’s being crawled
The crawl optimization feature in Yoast SEO lets you turn off crawling for certain types of URLs, scripts, and metadata that WordPress automatically adds. This makes it possible to improve your SEO and reduce your carbon footprint with just a few clicks.
Check out this fun animation to get an idea of what this feature can do for your website:
The crawl optimization feature was already part of Yoast SEO Premium, but today we’re also bringing it to the free version of our plugin. We do this to make as much of an impact as possible. There are over 13 million Yoast SEO users, so if everyone’s website crawling is optimized, we can have an enormous impact!
How to use the crawl optimization feature
How do you get started with crawl optimization for your website? Just go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Advanced > Crawl optimization. Here you will find an overview of all the types of metadata, content formats, etc., that you can tell search engines not to crawl. You can use the toggles on the right to enable crawl optimization.
Screenshot of the Crawl optimization section in Yoast SEO settings
The crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO 20.4 allow you to:
Remove unwanted metadata: WordPress adds a lot of links and content to your site’s and HTTP headers. For most websites, you can safely disable these, making your site faster and more efficient.
Disable unwanted content formats: For every post, page, and category on your site, WordPress creates multiple types of feeds; content formats designed to be consumed by crawlers and machines. But most of these are outdated, and many websites won’t need to support them. Disable the formats you’re not actively using to improve your site’s efficiency.
Remove unused resources: WordPress loads countless resources, some of which your site might not need. Removing these can speed up your site and save energy if you’re not using them.
Internal site search cleanup: Your internal site search can create many confusing URLs for search engines and can even be used by SEO spammers to attack your site. This feature identifies some common spam patterns and stops them in their tracks. Most sites will benefit from experimenting with these optimizations, even if your theme doesn’t have a search feature.
Advanced: URL cleanup: Users and search engines may often request your URLs using query parameters, like ?color=red. These can help track, filter, and power advanced functionality – but they come at a performance and SEO ‘cost.’ Sites that don’t rely on URL parameters might benefit from these options. Important note: These are expert features, so ensure you know what you’re doing before removing the parameters.
That’s it for now. Make sure to update to Yoast SEO 20.4 and optimize your website’s crawling immediately! It’s not only better for your website, your site visitors, and search engines. It also has a positive impact on our environment. Especially when you realize how many we are, if all 13 million of us optimize the crawling on our website, we can reduce the amount of energy used by a ridiculous amount. So let’s start right now!
Today, we’re making Yoast SEO 20.3 available to the world. This release comes with a long list of enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements designed to help you improve your SEO experience.
Improved highlighting in analyses
One of the most significant updates in this release is an improved highlighting feature. Yoast SEO helps you quickly locate where you need to make your edits to improve the readability of your content by highlighting the pieces in your text.
In this release, we’ve made the highlighter better. We can now highlight content in captions of audio, embed, gallery, image, table, and video blocks in WordPress. You can also use it to highlight content in Yoast SEO FAQ and How-to blocks.
The highlighter helps you locate the places where you’ve used your keyword, like in this caption
Portuguese language enhancements
We’ve made important improvements to our Portuguese assessments in the release, like the passive voice and transition words assessments.
Yoast SEO’s passive voice assessment helps you create clearer and more concise content. Passive voice can weaken sentences. It can make them harder to understand, so this assessment checks your text for instances of passive voice. By reducing the use of passive voice in your writing, you can improve your content’s overall quality and readability. The assessment is available in multiple languages.
The transition words assessment in Yoast SEO helps improve the coherence and readability of your writing. Transition words are essential to connect ideas and help readers understand the flow of your content. By analyzing your text for the use of transition words, the assessment can suggest improvements to your writing. We’ll highlight instances where transition words could be added or replaced.
In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved these two assessments for the Portuguese language. The passive voice assessment now has better detection of participles. Plus, we’ve added new transition words to the transition words assessment, thanks to the contributions of Mathias Ribeiro.
Bug fixes and enhancements
Regarding bug fixes, we’ve addressed several issues in this release. For example, shortcodes in the Block editor will no longer be treated as words in the content analysis. Additionally, editing text in the Classic editor while the highlighting feature is enabled will no longer make the text unfocused, and self-closing break tags </br> will now be removed when analyzing content.
Other improvements in this release include avoiding PHP warnings due to a wrong variable type. Also, we removed the beta badge for the inclusive language assessment.
Yoast SEO Premium redirect manager
Yoast SEO Premium also gets a round of enhancements this time. For one, we’ve made the links in the redirect manager clickable. It’s now easier to check if these are functioning properly. The redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium is a valuable tool for ensuring that your website visitors always find what they need. It helps prevent 404 errors and maintain a well-structured website, improving search engine rankings and user experience.
Update to Yoast SEO 20.3
At Yoast, we’re always working hard to improve our line of SEO plugins. Each release brings improvements and enhancements that make it easier to manage your site or improve its SEO. Yoast SEO 20.3 has a long list of fixes and improvements, from highlighting content to enhanced support for the Portuguese language.
We take security seriously at Yoast and continually look for potential threats and vulnerabilities that could affect our products and customers. That’s why we were alarmed when security firm WordFence found XSS vulnerabilities in another SEO plugin. After carefully reviewing the issues, we found a similar but less severe vulnerability in Yoast SEO, which we chose to patch immediately.
Please update to the latest version today to ensure your site is protected.
Am I affected?
The issue only affected websites with multiple users, where those users had ‘contributor’ level access or above. In some cases, those users could store and execute code in our snippet editor, which would have run for other users. A malicious person could have taken advantage of this to compromise other users or the website in question. This is a type of ‘XSS’ attack.
In short, some of the people you’d given limited permission to publish or edit content on your site might have been able to work around those permissions and do harm should they have wished to.
What’s an XSS vulnerability?
XSS stands for cross-site scripting, a type of attack that allows malicious actors to inject scripts into web pages viewed by other users. An issue like this can lead to various consequences, such as hijacking user sessions, defacing websites, or redirecting users to malicious sites.
XSS vulnerabilities occur when user input fields are not properly sanitized (ensuring that values are safe and conform to expected formats and patterns) or not properly escaped (where special characters or code is safely converted to text).
What do I need to do?
If your site has multiple users, you may have been affected. If this applies to you, you should update your Yoast SEO plugin immediately. We also recommend conducting a security audit (see our security guide), enabling auto-updates for plugins, and ensuring that you have regular backups in place.
If your site doesn’t have multiple users, you don’t need to worry. Of course, you should still update your plugin as part of best practices.
What did Yoast do?
We’re proud that we reacted quickly, fixed this issue, and released a patch within 24 hours. We also thoroughly reviewed parts of Yoast SEO and found no other security issues present. Thanks to this fix, Yoast SEO is now more secure than ever. Our development processes now include extra checks to ensure that issues like this don’t happen again.
We can proudly say that our ability to react, diagnose, and deliver updates this quickly – whether they’re security fixes or responses to changes in Google’s algorithm — sets us apart from others.
It takes a village
While this issue should have never happened in the first place, we’re happy that we discovered it ourselves before it became common knowledge and a larger risk.
That was made possible partly by the great work from WordFence in disclosing the related issue in another plugin and by Roger Montti’s article in Search Engine Journal covering the leak. We appreciate their professionalism and expertise in helping WordPress plugin developers improve their security.
We also want to thank our customers for their trust and support. At Yoast, we’re committed to providing you with the best SEO plugins and will continue to improve them.
If you have any questions or concerns about this issue or any other security matter, please do not hesitate to contact us at security@yoast.com. You can also participate in our security program to help us improve our work.
Thanks for your understanding, and keep in mind that we are always here to help.
In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved our innovative indexables technology. We’ve developed a faster and more reliable way of indexing your site’s data. In turn, we make better use of this data to improve your site’s SEO. Plus, this technology helps us do our best to make the web greener and lays the groundwork for exciting future possibilities.
An improved indexing system
You might be wondering, “What exactly are indexables?” Well, think of them as a way to help search engines find and understand the content on your website. An indexable is any resource a search engine can index via a URL.
When a search engine “indexes” your website, it creates a map of all the pages it knows about. The indexables framework allows Yoast SEO to make a similar map of your site, interact with it and manage important SEO-related information.
But what makes indexables so special? Essentially, they allow Yoast SEO to better handle different types of content on your website beyond just traditional pages. This includes things like categories, archives, media files and far beyond that. This can greatly help larger sites with many different content types. Plus, it helps us build features on top of it!
And the best part? The indexables technology means better performance and more efficient use of resources. It’s a step towards making the web a little bit greener, as it reduces the amount of processing power needed to manage SEO metadata.
So, how does this work?
When you create a website, you like stuff to be easily accessible online. Indexables help Yoast SEO understand your website, so it can help search engines like Google understand your website better. Yoast SEO stores information about your website in a unique database table that we use to uncover and use your data — and speed up your database.
To put indexables to work, you need to optimize your website’s SEO data. You can do this when you set up Yoast SEO or at a later date. When you optimize your SEO data, Yoast SEO will store information about your website’s pages in a unique table. This can take some time, especially for large websites, but you only need to do it once. After the initial optimization, Yoast SEO will automatically update the indexables table whenever you change something on your website.
Today, we’re launching improvements to this system for Yoast SEO and WooCommerce SEO.
You can run the indexables SEO optimization from the first-time configuration screen or in the tools section of Yoast SEO
Going green with Yoast SEO
Our enhanced database system is one of the many improvements we’ve made to make a difference on the web. Thanks to this technology, we’ve improved the loading times of millions of websites. Features like our crawl optimization options help you determine what search engines should and shouldn’t crawl — keeping them in check and making them waste fewer resources.
When your website loads faster, it reduces the time and energy required to load and display each page. Less resources, such as electricity and data, are needed to load your website. This increased efficiency can positively impact the environment by reducing the energy required to power and cool the servers that host your website.
Additionally, optimizing your SEO data and improving the crawlability of your website makes it more efficient and easier for search engines and visitors to navigate.
Update to Yoast SEO 20.2
Yoast SEO 20.2 comes with an update to our indexable database system. With this release, we’re laying the groundwork for some interesting new developments. Plus, we’ve improved the system’s performance, helping to achieve a better web — and a greener planet! — for all.
Let’s say you have a website but know little about SEO. But you’ve heard about Yoast SEO, and people have told you it’s a great tool to optimize your site for Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines. So you install the Yoast SEO plugin. What now? Well, our plugin needs your input to help your pages rise to the top of the search results. In this beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO, we’ll guide you through the most important steps to get the most out of this plugin and your content!
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means optimizing your pages to get them to a high position in the search results of Google or other search engines. If you have a website and want to attract more people to it, SEO should be a part of your marketing strategy. Our plugin, Yoast SEO, helps you with that by fixing a lot of the technical stuff. But also by giving you feedback on your content to optimize it for SEO and your website users.
A beginner‘s guide to Yoast SEO
Before we start, note that this isn’t a guide to every single detail of the Yoast SEO plugin. This post introduces some important things that you should use or configure first. In this beginner’s guide, we assume that you have the plugin installed. Not quite there yet? Check out how to install Yoast SEO Premium or our free Yoast SEO plugin before you read on.
The Yoast SEO first-time configuration is a great starting point to set up your plugin. You will get the option to start the first-time configuration right after installing Yoast SEO. Don’t see the welcome screen or already have the plugin installed? You can also the configuration in the backend of your WordPress website by going to Yoast SEO > General and clicking the First-time configuration tab:
Start your Yoast SEO journey with the first-time configuration
The first-time configuration guides you through several steps that help you set up our plugin to suit your site’s needs. By answering a few simple questions, Yoast SEO will learn more about your website and how it can help out with your SEO. Even if your site has been around for a while, it still pays off to complete the configuration. It’s also a good idea to repeat it now and again to make sure your settings are still up to date. Because the information you fill in here helps Google and other search engines understand your site better.
For example, in the second step, you’ll be asked if your website is about you or an organization you represent. This is relevant because the information you fill in here is used in Google’s Knowledge Graph. What is a Knowledge Graph, you ask? It is the block of information you often see on the right-hand side of the search results when you search for a company or person. So make sure to fill in all the fields you can in this step to provide Google with this information and increase your chances of a Knowledge Graph. But the first-time configuration also improves your site’s technical settings with SEO data optimization and asks for your social media profiles to help Google understand these belong to the same person or company. If you want more help getting Yoast SEO configured correctly for your site, check out the help article on how to use the first-time configuration.
The tip of the technical iceberg
There are many aspects to SEO and many more settings you can tweak in the plugin. But we set the first-time configuration so that it correctly configures the plugin’s general settings for your website. And there’s also loads of other stuff that Yoast SEO handles for you, to give you a head start on your technical SEO. Here are a few of the things Yoast SEO automatically takes care of in the background. Our plugin:
Outputs structured data for your pages, helping Google understand them even better.
Creates an XML sitemap that search engines use to find and index your pages.
Yoast SEO Premium also avoids dead ends on your site by automatically creating redirects when you move or delete content.
There are lots more hidden features and settings that you control, we’ll talk about those later on. For now, it’s good to know that all of this allows Yoast SEO to roll out the red carpet for the search bots, making it easy for search engines to find and understand your content.
Using the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box
Yoast SEO is known for its green, orange, and red traffic lights, giving you feedback that helps you optimize your content. Back in the day, you’d find these in the Yoast SEO meta box below your post editor. Nowadays, if you’re using the WordPress Block editor, you can also find them in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right side of the editor.
Are you using the block editor, but not seeing the sidebar? Make sure to click on the Yoast SEO sidebar icon at the top right of your screen:
Click the Yoast SEO icon to open the Yoast SEO sidebar
Here, we’ll highlight four essential elements you’ll find in both the Yoast SEO meta box and the Yoast SEO sidebar:
The Focus keyphrase
The SEO analysis
The Readability analysis
The Google preview
When you write a post or page for your website, checking these four elements should be the bare minimum before publishing your content. If you have more time and want to fully optimize a post, we’d advise following the steps described in this blog post checklist.
The focus keyphrase
The focus keyphrase field is the first in the Yoast SEO sidebar and the meta box. In your Yoast SEO sidebar, on the right side of your editor, you’ll find this field at the top:
The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO sidebar
Below your post, you’ll find it in the SEO tab of the meta box:
The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO meta box
In this field, you can enter the phrase you’d like this specific post or page to rank for in the search engines. By adding this keyphrase (or keyword), Yoast SEO will give you feedback on how well you’ve optimized the content for that specific keyphrase. It’s good to note that adding a keyphrase here doesn’t mean that Google will ‘know’ that you want the page to rank for that keyphrase. It simply helps Yoast SEO give you helpful feedback, so adding the keyphrase without looking at any of the feedback will not do anything for your rankings.
You can add this keyphrase at any moment, but we suggest adding it immediately as a reminder to keep your content focused on this topic. Wondering how to choose the perfect focus keyphrase? Read our guide on choosing a focus keyphrase, as it will help you select the right keyphrase you want to (and can) rank for. You can select a keyphrase post-by-post, but if you’re serious about your rankings, you must conduct keyword research first.
Yoast SEO Premium allows you to set related keyphrases and synonyms too, which is great if you want to take your SEO copywriting to the next level. You need user-focused and high-quality content to rank high in a (competitive) market. Because Google is getting smarter, Yoast SEO Premium recognizes variations of your keyphrase and helps you write natural and user-friendly content.
The SEO analysis
When you’ve added a keyphrase (and ideally a bit of content), Yoast SEO is able to run the SEO analysis. This analysis evaluates how well your content is optimized to rank for that keyphrase. For instance, it checks whether you’ve used the keyphrase enough and not too often. But also whether it’s in your SEO title, meta description, images, or subheadings. Moreover, it checks other SEO aspects of your content that are not related to your keyphrase, for instance, if you have any internal links to other articles on your website which is also important for search engines to understand your content.
The SEO analysis in the Yoast SEO sidebar
Getting orange or red traffic lights? Look at the feedback the analysis gives and try to make improvements where possible. To dive deeper into this, read our article on how to use Yoast SEO’s content analysis.
The readability analysis
Below the focus keyphrase field and SEO analysis, you can find the Readability analysis tab (in the Yoast SEO sidebar). It’s best to look at this tab after you’ve written the first version of your post or page. It gives you a red, orange, or green traffic light, which reflects your text’s readability score. This analysis contains a few different checks that our plugin automatically does on your content. Open the tab to find out how you score on all the individual checks and what you can improve on. You may wonder why you should look at this tab, but trust us: readability is crucial for SEO!
The Yoast SEO readability checks in the sidebar
If a traffic light is green, you’re doing great in that field. Is it orange or red? You can follow the instructions along with the traffic light to improve on this front. If there’s an eye icon, you can click that to see what part of the text still needs some checking. Now you don’t need to get every traffic light green but try to get the overall traffic light for the readability analysis green to end up with readable text. That way, the readability analysis helps you write easy-to-read content that your readers will love!
Our readability analysis works for many languages, and our team is working hard to add more languages as we go. If you’re interested in finding more about the logic behind this analysis, you can read more on how to use this analysis in Yoast SEO.
The inclusive language analysis
The third analysis that you can find in Yoast SEO is the inclusive language analysis which gives you feedback on any potentially non-inclusive words or phrases you’re using in your text. We at Yoast strongly believe that you should inclusive language in your content. Because creating inclusive content is good for both your users and SEO. Wondering how that works? Read more about it in our post on inclusive language and SEO.
The Yoast SEO inclusive language analysis in the sidebar
Wondering how it works and what the analysis looks at? You can read all that and more on our page dedicated to the inclusive language analysis. Also, it’s good to note that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it won’t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content.
Does every traffic light need to be green?
No, not every single traffic light in the different analyses has to be green for your post or page to rank. Similarly, getting your post and traffic lights ‘all-green’ in no way guarantees that it will rank. While it’s tempting to aim for all-green traffic lights on every post or page without working on other aspects of your SEO, this isn’t the best SEO strategy. Proper keyword research and site structure always come before getting green bullets. Read more about properly using the colored traffic light system in Yoast SEO.
The Google preview
In addition to analyzing your content, we provide an editable snippet or Google preview. In the meta box below your post, it’s in the SEO tab, and in the sidebar, you can find it here:
You can find all the features of Yoast SEO in the sidebar in the block editor
The Google preview makes it easy to optimize your post for the search results
In the Google preview, you can set an SEO title and meta description. Make an effort and write a title and meta description that reflect what your post or page is about. Let people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site and entice them to visit your page. There’s no guarantee that Google will display your meta description in the results pages. But if the meta description you add here is good, you’ll increase the odds of it being used.
Other items in the sidebar and meta box
As said before, we believe this is the minimum investment you should make before publishing a page or post. You may have noticed more items in the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box, like the internal linking suggestions, social previews, Schema, cornerstone content, insights, and advanced section. It’s worth looking at those, as these can also help your SEO efforts!
A bit more advanced: Yoast SEO Settings
Of course, there is so much more you can do with Yoast SEO. You can access and change lots of settings in the Yoast SEO settings overview. There’s usually no need to change anything. Especially if you’re new to SEO, it’s wise to start with the settings you set with the first-time configuration. But let’s quickly look around to give you an idea of the options.
Go to Yoast SEO > Settings in the left-hand side navigation in your WordPress dashboard to go to the Settings overview. Here you can select which features you want to use, how your site should appear in search engines and loads more! Use the menu on your left to navigate the different settings that are divided into four categories: General, Content types, Categories & Tags and Advanced.
The Yoast SEO settings overview
When you go to the Yoast SEO Settings, you land on the Site features page in the General section. Here you can select which Yoast SEO features you want to actively use and which ones you want to opt out on. Each feature that is listed there comes with a short explanation of what it does and you can use the toggle below to activate or deactivate the feature.
Site basics
In the General section, you can also find Site basics. As the name suggests, you can configure the basics of your website here. Take the Title Separator, for instance. You can choose whether you want a dash, asterisk, or something else between the different parts of your SEO title that will be shown in the search results. But, if you change your mind later, you can always change it here. Read more about the options in our help article on the Yoast SEO Settings: Site basics.
Simply pick what you want, but the default option is usually the best one
In addition to the separator of your SEO title, you might also want to change how your SEO titles are set up. Simply go to Content types, click on Posts or any other content type (depending on which one you want to change) and go to Search Appearance. Here you can change how our plugin sets up your titles and meta descriptions. Set up by using snippet variables that tell the plugin what the title of your post is or the separator of your choice.
Change the variables in any way you like
This simply means we will use the title of your page or post as the page title. Then we add a title separator (which we discussed in the first paragraph of this section) and the site name you set when creating your site. So, for example, the title for this Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO post would look like this:
Feel free to change this setup, but this is the one we recommend. It’s focused on the page title (Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO) and has proper branding at the end (Yoast). We’re highlighting this to give you an example of the type of settings that you can find here, but of course, there are loads more.
We hope this gives you an idea of the options that Yoast SEO gives you. Throughout the years, we’ve introduced a lot of new features to our plugins. With that said, there are also many things we haven’t done in Yoast SEO, a few of them being things that we probably won’t ever do. If you’re curious as to what these are, check out our blog post on things we don’t do in Yoast SEO and why.
Other guides for (Yoast) SEO beginners
That’s it for our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. With Yoast SEO properly installed, your website is ready to take on the competition and climb to the top of the search results!
If you want to become a pro user of the Yoast SEO plugin, here are a few more reading recommendations:
