Tag: yoast seo

Yoast SEO 20.1: Mastodon and inclusive language improvements
After successfully introducing a new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0, we have more exciting news! We have built an integration with Mastodon, the decentralized and open-source social network. Yoast SEO Premium users can now verify the link in their Mastodon profile with this integration. Weâ€™re also adding your profile to the structured data we generate for your site. Plus, we’re improving our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO 20.1.

Mastodon is picking up steam

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many people have moved to the popular open-source alternative, Mastodon.

Mastodon is part of the fediverse (a combination of the words federated and universe). Unlike Twitter, it’s a decentralized network of communities and platforms, powered by open-source communication software. This provides an alternative to centralized social media, giving users more control over their privacy and data. It also provides more options for people to join communities based on common interests and values.

Introducing a Mastodon integration to Yoast SEO 20.1

The Mastodon integration in Yoast SEO Premium does two things:
1. It helps you verify the link to your site in your Mastodon profile
2. It adds your Mastodon profile to the sameAs structured data we output for your site
The integration allows users to verify the links on their Mastodon profile quickly and easily. Simply switch on the Mastodon integration, add the URL of your profile in Yoast SEO, and add a link to your site on Mastodon itself. After that, refresh your Mastodon page, which should show a green verified link in your profile.

Enter the link to your Mastodon profile on the Site representation section of Yoast SEO

The Schema structured data for Mastodon works automatically. After adding your Mastodon profile in the Yoast SEO settings, we add that link to the structured data graph we generate for your site. We use the same sameAs links for other platforms. This makes it easy for search engines to identify all the other platforms you are active on.

This integration is part of our ongoing commitment to making content creation and distribution as seamless as possible for our users. Our values align with Mastodon’s focus on the open web, user privacy, free speech, and community building. So we’re excited to offer this integration to our users. Try it now!

Also, an Easy Digital Downloads integration

In addition to the Mastodon integration, we’ve added an integration for the popular Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) WordPress plugin. We improved Easy Digital Download’s Schema output for this integration and tied it into the Yoast SEO schema graph. This makes the combination much more robust. You can activate it in the Integrations section of Yoast SEO.

More add-ons integrating with the Yoast SEO Schema API

Improvements to the inclusive language analysis

Over the past months, weâ€™ve worked hard on making our inclusive language analysis as helpful as possible. In Yoast SEO 20.1, we are releasing an improved version of our inclusive language analysis. This latest addition to our collection of SEO tools emphasizes the importance of using language that is inclusive, respectful, and free of bias.

Language is one of the most powerful tools for creating a more inclusive world. With the inclusive language analysis, we want to empower our users to make a positive impact through their writing.

Creating content that resonates with all audiences is essential in todayâ€™s rapidly changing and diverse digital landscape. The inclusive language analysis provides real-time feedback on the language used in your content and offers suggestions to help you create more inclusive content.

If you havenâ€™t started using the new and improved inclusive language analysis, try it out now! Help create a more inclusive and respectful digital community for all.

Upgrade now to Yoast SEO 20.1

Two weeks ago, we successfully launched the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0. Reactions have been really positive! Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal said, â€œIâ€™ve been practicing SEO for almost 25 years, and this version of Yoast is the easiest-to-use SEO plugin Iâ€™ve used to date.â€

After releasing that first piece of the puzzle, we are excited to present you with more shortly. But for now, weâ€™re introducing Yoast SEO 20.1 with a new Mastodon integration and improvements to the inclusive language analyses.

Happy updating!

The post Yoast SEO 20.1: Mastodon and inclusive language improvements appeared first on Yoast.
07.02.2023
Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress: An Easy Setup Guide
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of any website. It works side by side with writing good original content, and keyword research, and is crucial to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). While WordPress does have some search engine friendly aspects to it, you’ll need a little help to truly score a higher ranking. This is where the Yoast SEO Plugin comes in.

In this post, we’ll give you an overview of what it is, walk you through its first-time configuration of it, and show you how to use it by giving you a step-by-step overview. Let’s get started.

What is Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress is an all-in-one SEO solution for your website. It provides in-depth SEO analysis, snippet previews, robust readability tools, and webmaster tools to make configuring SEO a less daunting task. With so many tools in its arsenal, Yoast is considered one of the top WordPress SEO plugins.

There are two options for the plugin – a free version that is available on WordPress.org and a premium version, which has advanced features such as multiple keyword phrases, social previews, and link suggestions during writing. Yoast also has other SEO plugins to optimize your SEO strategy even more.

How to Use Yoast SEO Plugin in WordPress (Step by Step)

In this section, we’ll give you all of the information you need to configure Yoast SEO. We’ll cover installation, the first-time configuration wizard, how to set up on-page SEO, and give you an in-depth look at the SEO dashboard.

Install and Activate the Yoast SEO Plugin

Start by logging in to your WordPress dashboard. Next, navigate to Plugins > Add New.

Type Yoast into the search bar. When the page refreshes, select the plugin then click the Install Now button.

Finally, click the Activate button to activate the plugin.

When the page refreshes, you’ll be directed to the welcome screen, where you can start the first-time configuration.

Complete First-time Configuration

The first-time configuration of the Yoast SEO plugin optimizes your data to allow search engines to find your site easier, enter important site information, add social media profile pages, and configure your personal preferences.

Click the Start first-time configuration button to get started.

SEO Data Optimization

Yoast SEO helps give search engines such as Google a better understanding of your site. First, you’ll want to start SEO data optimization. Yoast will store all metadata for all pages and posts in a database table called the indexibles. It streamlines the indexing process into one database request, reduces page speed loading times, and helps search engines find your site.

Site Representation

The next set of settings will help search engines identify your website by site type, site name, your organization’s name, and logo.

Social Profiles

Yoast displays Facebook and Twitter by default, but you can add as many additional profiles as needed here.

Yoast SEO Personal Preferences

Next, select whether you want Yoast to track your data. Yoast tracks plugins, themes, information on your website’s server, and some user data.

At this point, you should have most of what you need already in place. We’ll get to the dashboard options in more detail later. But for now, let’s take a look at how Yoast SEO works for on-page SEO.

How to Use the Yoast SEO Meta Box (for on-page SEO)

The Yoast SEO meta box is an on-page SEO tool that allows you to optimize your SEO content for each post/page on your site in real-time. Using the meta box increases the chance of better rankings in SERPs.

You can find the meta box in at the bottom of the page editor.

If you are using a block editor, click the Yoast icon at the top right to access the Yoast SEO meta box.

SEO

The SEO tab gives you an analysis of your post’s content in real-time. It uses the green light system which rates your post content as good, okay, or needs improvement. Once a keyword is inserted, Yoast gets to work analyzing the content and suggests improvements.

Focus Keyphrase

A keyphrase (or keyword) is the main word or phrase you want your content to rank for in search results. You’ll want to do keyword research beforehand to find the right focus keyphrase.

You can also click the Get related keyphrases button in the meta box to add more related keywords you wish to rack for as well.

Google Preview

Google Preview gives you a glimpse of how your post will appear in search results in both desktop and mobile formats.

SEO Title & Slug (URL)

The SEO Page Title and the URL slug can be optimized in this section for best results. Make sure both are not too long and include your keyphrase for the best results.

Meta Description

The meta description is one of the most important parts of optimizing on-page SEO. It can give your potential visitors a reason to click. Therefore, it’s important to write a perfect meta description that is concise, includes your keyword(s), and describes the content accurately.

Yoast allows you to insert variables into the meta description such as site title, post title, primary category, and separator.

SEO Analysis

Under SEO analysis, Yoast provides an on-page SEO score and a checklist that you can use to optimize specific tasks to achieve a green light. It identifies problems, improvements, and good results.

To achieve a green light, the best approach is to write good content from the start. For some great tips, check out how to write quality SEO content.

For more ways to optimize your post for SEO, check these advanced SEO techniques.

Cornerstone Content

If the post is considered cornerstone content, you mark it as such here. If you’re not sure what this means, check out How to Optimize Cornerstone Content for SEO.

Advanced Features

Under Advanced, you have additional SEO options for your post. You can choose whether or not to allow search engines to show the post in search results, set follow links, select robot options, assign a breadcrumb title, and insert a canonical URL.

Insights

Here you can view the Flesch reading ease score of the post. This gives you insight as to how difficult it is to read your post, contains the word count, and estimated reading time. Premium options give you a breakdown of the most used words in your content, so you can cross-check your most used words with prominent words in search results focused on the same subject.

Readability

Yoast uses a proprietary algorithm to make readability results quite accurate. In most cases, you should try to get a readability score of 8, since the majority of people are comfortable reading at that level, according to the Flesch reading ease scale.

Like with SEO analysis, the scores are based on factors that are highlighted as problems (red), improvements (orange), and good results (green). In the example below, a section length issue is detected. Plus you can easily locate problem areas by clicking the “eye” icon next to each item in the list.

To learn more readability tips, check out How to Get the Perfect Yoast SEO Readability Score.

Schema

Under Schema, you can use Schema markup to optimize your site’s SEO so that it is easier to index by search engines. In Yoast SEO, you can change schema settings in the dashboard or on individual posts and pages here.

Social

The Social tab allows you to control how your post’s preview is displayed on social media platforms. You can assign a custom image, title, and description for each. Because social media platforms have a different display for posts on their platforms, it’s worth considering an upgrade to premium.

Explore the Yoast SEO Plugin Dashboard

The dashboard allows you to configure settings by assigning them to four major groups – general settings, content types, categories and tags, and advanced settings.

In the general settings, you can view potential problems and notifications such as release notes, and upcoming features.

Yoast SEO General Settings Tab

Out of the box, the most important features are enabled. However, others such as inclusivity â€“ which detects content that may be offensive to certain groups â€“ are available.
- SEO analysis: Measures on-page SEO
- Readability Analysis: Gain insight on your siteâ€™s readability.
- Inclusive language analysis: Detects derogatory content with options to correct it.
- Insights: Reveals information about reading ease score, estimated reading time, and word count.
- Cornerstone content: Enables the ability to assign a particular post as cornerstone content.
- Text link Counter: Detects the number of internal links in posts.
- Link suggestions: A premium feature that suggests internal links to posts or pages on your site.
- Open Graph data: Allows social media to display a preview with images and text.
- Twitter card data: Allows Twitter to display a preview when your site’s link is shared.
- Slack sharing: Shares an author byline and reading time estimate in Slack channels.
- Admin bar menu: Grants access to Yoast tools on the front end of your WordPress site.
- REST API endpoint: Gives headless WordPress sites the ability to add metadata to individual URLs.
- XML sitemaps: optimize what to include in your XML sitemap and submit it to Google.
- IndexNow: A premium feature that enables automatic pings on Bing and Yandex.
Setup Social Settings

One major change to Yoast involves the social settings. Formerly located in its own tab in the WordPress toolbar, it’s now located under the site representation > other profiles section in general settings.

For most users, there won’t be a need to modify settings here. The information you added in the first-time configuration was automatically added to this section once the configuration was completed. That being said, you aren’t limited to just Facebook and Twitter. Unlike other plugins, Yoast allows you to add other social platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, or LinkedIn.

Content Types

This tab controls the search appearance options for posts and pages. You can enable all post types, enable only some, and configure the settings for each. Basic settings include options to streamline SEO titles and meta descriptions. If entered in the content types tab, your posts and pages will use the same SEO title structure and meta description.

The options include:
- Title & Meta Description
- Social image
- Social title
- Social description
Categories and Tags

In this section, the settings are identical to the content types section, except they apply to taxonomies.

Yoast SEO Advanced Settings

Under this tab, you can configure crawl optimization settings (with a premium license), breadcrumbs, other pages such as author archives, date archives, format archives and special pages. There are additional settings for media pages and RSS feeds.

Breadcrumbs

The breadcrumbs settings in Yoast SEO allow you to customize the appearance of breadcrumbs on your site. There are plenty of options that allow you to customize the display of your breadcrumb navigation, choose which taxonomies to show for content types, and more.

Archives

Under the Archives tab, you can disable the author, date, or special page archives in the search results. Plus, you have additional settings to allow you to either show or hide the authors without posting the results. Like other search appearance tabs, you can create a custom SEO title and meta description as well. Those with a premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin can configure how these types of pages will display on social media platforms.

Media

By default, Yoast disables media page URLs because they serve no purpose in SEO. If you wish to enable media URLs, you can do so here. Once enabled, you’ll be able to configure search appearance options, schema, and SEO controls and assessments, which determines whether Yoast SEO tools and controls are visible in the attachment editor.

RSS

The Yoast SEO plugin has an automatic tool that allows you to add content to your RSS feed. You can assign content to appear before each post in the feed, as well as add content after each post. Additionally, you can input variables that perform various options such as adding a link to the post, where the title is the anchor text and more.

Integrations

Under Yoast SEO > Integrations you’ll find a list of integrations including SEMrush, Wincher, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and more. Some integrations are only available with Premium.

Yoast SEO Tools

There are a few handy tools available with Yoast that allow you to speed up your site, save time editing, and configure important SEO files on your server.
1. Import and export: Import settings from another SEO plugin, or export your settings for use in other sites.
2. File editor: Create a robot.txt file or edit your .htaccess file.
3. Bulk editor: Bulk edit SEO titles and meta descriptions.
4. Optimize SEO data:Give your site a speed boost by running the data optimization tool.
Yoast SEO Plugin FAQs

Since Yoast SEO is a broad topic, so you’re bound to have questions. Hopefully, these will help.

Does Yoast SEO Have Tutorials I Can Follow?

Yes! The Yoast SEO academy is free for you to learn the basics of SEO, as well as the Yoast SEO plugin. If you require more advanced training, they offer a paid version of the courses with your purchase of the premium plugin.

How Do I Add My Website to the Google Search Console?

Trying to figure out how to do things in Google can be a bit daunting. Thankfully, we have everything you need to know in our ultimate guide to Google Search Console.

Is Configuring SEO Different If I Have a WooCommerce Site?

While the concept of SEO is relatively the same, there are some added components to consider. You’ll still need to configure on-page SEO for your posts and pages, but there are the added elements of products, product categories, and your shop. Yoast has a WooCommerce SEO plugin you can use. But there are other alternatives you can consider as well. Check out WooCommerce SEO: A Complete Guide to Ranking #1 on our blog to learn some tips and best practices to help you dominate the eCommerce market.

How Important is Google Preview Where SEO is Concerned?

Taking the time to write a good SEO title, use a captivating feature image, and write an attention-grabbing meta description are crucial for SEO. This is true for desktop users, but for mobile users as well. Since roughly 60% of the internet’s users utilize a mobile device for internet surfing, it is more important than ever. Taking the time to learn the difference between desktop and mobile SEO is a critical aspect of your site’s success. Take a look at our ultimate guide to mobile SEO to learn more.

Yoast SEO is WordPress’ Best Friend

SEO is a highly advanced topic that requires quite a bit of understanding to master. You’ve taken the first step in that journey by learning how to use Yoast SEO. Thankfully, we offer countless resources to aid you along the way. By brushing up on your SEO techniques , gaining a better understanding of linking strategies, and recognizing the importance of mobile SEO in today’s digital landscape, you’ll have the tools necessary to up those rankings. With those additional resources, you’ll be ready to reach the top of the proverbial SEO mountain in no time.

Do you use Yoast SEO on your website? Let us know by dropping a comment below.

The post Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress: An Easy Setup Guide appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
02.02.2023
Yoast SEO 20.0: A brand-new settings interface
We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface thatâ€™s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and prepares us for a bright future!

Meet your new SEO best friend

With Yoast SEO, weâ€™ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming.

Itâ€™s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off!

The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0

A better interface for you and us

Weâ€™ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, itâ€™s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use.

Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: â€œWe felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us. Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPressâ€™s interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasnâ€™t progressed for years.â€

â€œIâ€™m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release,â€ says Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast. â€œOur team wanted to do this, and they delivered. It is a technically outstanding change and proves we are constantly improving and optimizing. Our new user interface shows weâ€™ll keep delivering the best possible experience to our users. A very exciting first step in 2023!â€

A logical structure for settings in Yoast SEO 20.0

The first thing you’ll notice about the new interface is its sleek, modern look and streamlined navigation. The new sidebar lets you quickly and easily access all essential settings and features without navigating multiple pages or menus. Weâ€™ve even added a search feature to find everything you need in a jiffy.

In our help documentation, you can find a guide on navigating the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0 and what moved where. Or, check out the video above to get a walkthrough of the new settings.

Four main sections

We reshuffled the contents of the old settings and divided them into four main sections:
- General:
  - Site features: here, you can easily switch specific features on and off, from the different analyses to IndexNow and the XML sitemaps.
  - Site basics: in this section, you can find the basic information about your site, like the name and tagline of the website, plus force rewrite options and the like.
  - Site representation: this section contains information about your site that helps search engines understand it better through Schema structured data, like if the site represents a person or an organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.
  - Site connections: here, you can connect the different search engine tools to your site, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Content types:
  - Here, youâ€™ll find your site’s settings for each content type. You can determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data describe this content best.
- Categories and tags:
  - Same as the content types, except this is for your taxonomies.
- Advanced:
  - Here, youâ€™ll find features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium. Plus breadcrumbs options, plus settings for various archives and special pages.
Individual feature settings pages

One of the most significant changes in Yoast SEO 20.0 is the new, intuitive layout of all the individual settings pages. Each setting now has a clear and concise explanation, making it easy to understand what it does and how to use it. The new interface also includes insightful links to give you more context on optimizing your website for search engines. This makes it much more user-friendly for those who are new to SEO.

Like a breath of fresh air

Yoast SEO 20.0 is a game changer

Overall, Yoast SEO 20.0 is a major step forward in developing the plugin, and we are confident that it will help you achieve your SEO goals more easily. The new interface is cleaner, more intuitive, and user-friendly. It’s now easier than ever for you to optimize your website for search engines. We are excited for you to start using the new interface and see it for yourself.

Thank you for choosing Yoast SEO. We look forward to helping you improve your website’s rankings with our new, super-modern settings interface. And remember, this is only the beginning!

Do tell us what you think in the comments below!

The post Yoast SEO 20.0: A brand-new settings interface appeared first on Yoast.
24.01.2023
Yoast SEO 19.14: Inclusive language analysis improvements

Last year, we launched the inclusive language analysis to help you open up your content to a broader audience. Itâ€™s been well-received, with thousands of people already using it to help improve their content. The analysis is free for everyone, so try it if you havenâ€™t. In Yoast SEO 19.14, we’re improving the analysis.

Why the inclusive language analysis?

Your SEO efforts often go hand in hand with expanding your audience. One way to achieve this is by crafting your content inclusive, which can make it more accessible to a broader range of people. The more individuals read and interact with your content, the higher the likelihood it will be shared, liked, or linked to by others.

Google also increasingly looks for language thatâ€™s helpful, not harmful. The latest updates to the Quality Raters Guidelines, released in December 2022, adds new examples of content that may be harmful to groups. With E-E-A-T, Google will focus more and more on finding and ranking content thatâ€™s truly helpful to a large audience.

The inclusive language analysis helps highlight non-inclusive terms and suggests inclusive replacements. Itâ€™s easy to use and doesnâ€™t block your work while writing. Itâ€™s also opt-in, so you have to turn it on to start using it.

Improvements to the inclusive language analysis

Weâ€™ve launched the inclusive language analysis in beta form, so we can collect feedback and improve based on that. Our team of expert linguists also has a long list of enhancements they want to add, making the analysis as valuable and helpful as possible.

In Yoast SEO 19.14, we launch the first wave of improvements. These mainly concern changes in which context we flag specific terms. Sometimes, terms are only harmful when used in a particular situation. Weâ€™ve fine-tuned the list of non-inclusive phrases and expanded it with more words. Weâ€™ve also added more alternatives for some terms to suggest the writer replace the non-inclusive terms, and weâ€™ve improved some of the feedback writers get.

And weâ€™re now also taking into account whether phrases are preceded and/or followed by function words, participles, and/or punctuation marks. This means we can determine for even more cases whether a term is used in a non-inclusive way and give feedback to change it.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.14

Yoast SEO 19.14 comes with the first wave of improvements to the inclusive language analysis. With this, weâ€™re making it easier to find non-inclusive terms and giving better feedback on improving your content.

The post Yoast SEO 19.14: Inclusive language analysis improvements appeared first on Yoast.

10.01.2023
Yoast SEO 19.13: Fixing a breaking issue in Gutenberg

Last week, we uncovered a problem in Gutenbergâ€™s upcoming release that breaks the block editorâ€™s link functionality when used in conjunction with Yoast SEO. The result is that users cannot create links using the editor. This release of the block editor will happen this week, so weâ€™re proactively updating Yoast SEO to be sure to fix this for our users.

The issue is in WordPressâ€™s block editor

The next release of the Gutenberg block editor will introduce functionality to let users remove unknown formatting in rich-text snippets. It does so by adding a new default formatting style, which breaks the link functionality in the visual editor. The result is that users can’t insert links through the interface.

The block editor update breaks the link feature

Moreover, even though blocks such as the Yoast SEO Related Linking blocks work fine â€” as they correctly create the links â€” the block editor then detects the links as having unknown formatting. The result is the same: linking doesnâ€™t work.

This is an issue in the WordPress block editor — not in Yoast SEO — that we have identified, but we want to work around this by updating the code in Yoast SEO in advance to ensure that our users donâ€™t run into this problem.

Today’s Yoast SEO release fixes the error WordPress introduced

Yoast SEO 19.13 fixes the issue

Yoast SEO 19.13 is out today, and this fixes a single issue with the link functionality in the next update of the block editor in WordPress. We do this to ensure that your editor keeps functioning as it should and that you can keep adding or updating links to your content.

The post Yoast SEO 19.13: Fixing a breaking issue in Gutenberg appeared first on Yoast.

20.12.2022
New in Yoast SEO Free: the inclusive language analysis

Earlier this year, we added a new feature to our Premium plugin, the inclusive language analysis. Now we’re excited to say that we’re bringing it to Yoast SEO Free as well. Why? Because we believe that using inclusive language is essential in making the web a better place.

Taking a stance

We believe that inclusive language is so important that we wanted to make sure that everyone (who wants to) can use this feature. Not only does it make you less likely to exclude people and alienate them with your content, but it’s also becoming more important in SEO every day. If you want to take advantage of this new feature, head to your features settings in Yoast SEO to turn it on. This will also be available in Yoast SEO for Shopify later this week.

Does inclusive language matter for SEO?

You might be wondering why we added a check for inclusive language in Yoast SEO, a product focused on improving your SEO. Using inclusive language helps you reach a wider audience and avoid alienating potential customers. It aims to create content that’s accessible and understandable to as many people as possible. This leads to more people returning to your website, sharing your content, and even buying what you’re selling.

It simply helps you to write content that doesn’t exclude people. Content that doesn’t alienate or even offend a portion of your audience. Which, especially as a business owner (or website owner), you don’t want to do. And that can happen easily without you even realizing it. Google also points out the importance of using inclusive language in your content. You can learn more about this in our post about inclusive language and SEO.

The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO

This new feature works pretty similarly to our other analyses by giving you real-time feedback on your text with the use of traffic lights. Here is an example of what it looks like when in use:

The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO

It’s up to you whether you activate the analysis

It’s good to know that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it wonâ€™t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content. You can activate it by going to Yoast SEO > General > Features and toggling the inclusive language analysis switch. If you choose not to use this feature, the SEO and readability analyses wonâ€™t change.

Activate this feature ve language analysis in Yoast SEO > General > Features

We strongly suggest using it as it can benefit your SEO and helps you make your content relatable for a bigger audience. The goal of inclusive language is to avoid excluding or alienating people. So, this new analysis helps you create content that everyone can enjoy and that’s less likely to offend anyone!

Other improvements and fixes

Of course, we’ve also worked on improvements for our SEO plugins. For instance, we’ve improved the subheading distribution assessment to make it easier to find those overlong paragraphs. Now, hit the eye icon to highlight the subheading where the piece of text appears. Very helpful when working on long articles! The same assessment also keeps an eye on your intro and warns you if you start your article with an overly long introduction.

Quickly find overly long pieces of text

We’ve improved our Integrations page, making it clearer which WordPress plugins hook into our Schema API. This means that the structured data output by these plugins will be neatly tied into the graph Yoast SEO generates for the site. Together, this forms a very comprehensive Schema solution. We urge other plugin developers to come on board — check out our Schema documentation!

Improved admin bar menu

Today, we’re cleaning up the admin bar menu and expanding the range of options. If you are a Yoast SEO Premium user, you can open up the front-end SEO inspector instantly to check the SEO settings of the page you are currently on. You’ll also find the focus keyphrase you set for this page and the overall readability and SEO scores in the famous colored dots. Plus, you can find quick links that let you send the page to be analyzed by external tools, like Google’s Rich Results Test or PageSpeed Insights. Of course, you also access the Yoast SEO settings from there.

Updated admin bar menu in Yoast SEO 19.12

Of course, there’s more. We’ve added a new Website name text field in the Site representation step of the First-time configuration. You can also set this in the Search Appearance section of the settings.

We’ve also worked on improving compatibility with PHP 8.2. In addition, we now ask users to update to a recent version of PHP, as we are dropping support for PHP < 7.2 starting March 1st, 2023.

Enjoy these Yoast SEO updates

In this release, we’ve added support for our inclusive language analyses to our free Yoast SEO version. Try it out and see if you can write more inclusive content that will help you reach a broader audience.

The post New in Yoast SEO Free: the inclusive language analysis appeared first on Yoast.

13.12.2022
Yoast SEO 19.11: Upgrading your SEO data

At Yoast HQ, weâ€™re doing our part to make your websites run like clockwork. One of the things weâ€™re working on is optimizing our Yoast SEO plugin to use fewer resources. This helps make your site faster and more efficient. In Yoast SEO 19.11, weâ€™re doing this by streamlining your database.

Improved SEO data optimization

We ask you to let Yoast SEO index your website data so we can get to work immediately. The data we index ends up in a special table in your database, which stores all the information we might need from an SEO perspective. We use this to understand your site and make our behind-the-scenes processes run faster.

In this release, we are improving the database and the underlying process determining how we fill the special table. In some cases, the table could contain things that shouldnâ€™t end up in the database. This could cause the database to be more extensive than it should be, leading to slower server responses. We’ve now sped this up.

In Yoast SEO 19.11, we put a lot of effort into ensuring that only things that need to end up in the database will end up in the database. Weâ€™re also cleaning up the database and deleting stray additions.

To help you manage your database, weâ€™ve added a WP-CLI command to clean up unused data from our custom database tables: wp yoast cleanup. Plus, weâ€™ve added the wpseo_indexable_excluded_taxonomies filter to allow manually excluding taxonomies from being indexed.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.11!

Yoast SEO 19.11 is ready for download. In this release, weâ€™ve mainly worked on improving our database usage and finetuning how we handle the SEO data we index. Your database should now be leaner â€” making it faster and more efficient. Happy updating!

The post Yoast SEO 19.11: Upgrading your SEO data appeared first on Yoast.

29.11.2022
Cyber Monday: 1 day left for a 30% discount on all products

It’s Cyber Monday, and the Yoast Black Friday deals are still going strong. Have you claimed your 30% discount yet? If not, hurry! Time is running out. Get the advanced features of our Premium plugins andÂ outrank your competitors in Google.Â Are you lookingÂ to save time and access easy tools and practical tips on boosting your rankings? Yes?! Then you should get Yoast SEO Premium!Â

Our 2022 Cyber Monday sale has now ended. But you can still sign up for our newsletter: youâ€™ll get all the latest Yoast SEO news and blog posts delivered straight to your inbox. Register now so you donâ€™t miss our next sale!

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Not convinced yet? In this post, we’ll tell you all about the benefits of Yoast SEO Premium and why your site can’t do without it â€” interested in one of our other plugins? Check out this post!

Write content that ranks in the search engines

To stand out in search engines, you must write high-quality, SEO-friendly content. SEO is still king (or queen!). Why? People donâ€™t want SEO-friendly content per se; they like what SEO-friendly content can do for them. You need to optimize your text for the right keywords without over-optimizing. Your text should be easy to read. You definitely should add keywords in a text; you should optimize your text. However, optimizing for search engines should never compromise the readability of your text. That could hurt your rankings.

Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced analysis that recognizes different word forms and synonyms. It can recognize plurals, past tense, and other word orders. You can add related keywords too. With Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll be able to optimize your text for SEO without compromising the readability of the text.

An example from a text optimized with Yoast SEO Premium for [puppy training] with the synonym [obedience classes]

Help Google to understand your site

Google is brilliant, but it needs help understanding the structure of your site. Always bear in mind that Google’s bots follow your internal links. That’s the way Google crawls through your site. That means you can’t have any dead ends or 404s on your site. Otherwise, Google will get lost. Yoast SEO Premium will help you to take care of all 404s with the redirect manager.

Posts with many will appear more important to Google than posts with little or no internal links. This means that you’ll need to optimize your internal links so that Google knows what the most important content is. Yoast SEO Premium offers practical SEO workouts to help you quickly improve and optimize your internal linking structure. Also, you’ll get internal linking suggestions within every post to further enhance your internal linking structure.

The cornerstone content workout in Yoast SEO Premium helps you to link to the most important articles

Manage the SEO of a growing website

If you keep adding content to your website, Google will have more trouble crawling through a big site. And what to do with outdated content? You shouldn’t have old stale content on your site. How do you keep track of it all?

Yoast SEO Premium will help you with your SEO maintenance. We will remind you to update those stale articles and tell you if you don’t update your most essential pages regularly. Our SEO workouts will help you keep track of your SEO and solve all kinds of problems you’ll encounter if your site gets large. With SEO workouts, we help you get the work done. We’ve made it incredibly easy to stay on top of your SEO, saving you precious time and effort. If you follow the steps in our workouts, we’ll make sure to keep your website crawlable.

Yoast SEO Premium also gets you access to a recent feature built to optimize crawling on your site. The crawl cleanup settings give you more control over which unnecessary and unimportant URLs, scripts, and metadata in WordPress you want to keep Google from crawling. WordPress automatically adds these to your site, only adding unneeded overhead. Blocking these URLs makes your site easier to crawl — making your site a lot more sustainable!

In the Crawl optimization section of Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll find a load of options to finetune crawling

Learn EVERYTHING about SEO with Yoast SEO academy

Buying Yoast SEO Premium will give you access to all of the online courses of Yoast SEO academy. And you want that! We’ll help you get started with keyword research and how to set up an internal linking strategy, but we’ll also teach you everything about structured data. Everything you ever want to learn about SEO is covered in one of our courses.

Each course consists of multiple short videos, reading materials, and quizzes. We’ll share a lot of practical tips that you can put into practice right away.

A small sampling of what’s available in Yoast SEO academy

Only a couple of hours left to go green on Cyber Monday!

What are you waiting for? Make sure to go green today and buy Yoast SEO Premium with a 30% discount. And start outranking your competitors! But be quick, as this sale won’t last forever…

Go Premium and unlock this feature!

Unlock our internal linking features and get free access to all of our SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium:

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only €99 EUR / year (ex VAT)

The post Cyber Monday: 1 day left for a 30% discount on all products appeared first on Yoast.

28.11.2022
Yoast SEO, Local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO updates
Today, weâ€™re releasing updates for four plugins and add-ons: Yoast SEO 19.10, Yoast SEO Premium 19.5, Local SEO 14.7, and WooCommerce SEO 15.3. The updates mainly consist of enhancements and fixes, plus support for material structured data in WooCommerce SEO. Find out what else is new!

Yoast SEO 19.10 and Premium 19.5

The overarching theme of these releases is to get ready for the upcoming High Performance Order Storage feature in WooCommerce 7.1+. This feature is more commonly known as custom order tables. This long-awaited improvement promises significant performance gains for ecommerce sites. With todayâ€™s update, all of our WordPress plugins support this.

Besides that, we improved some small things in Yoast SEO, like giving you better feedback in the Flesch Reading Ease insights when we see that text is fairly difficult. Plus, weâ€™ve fixed two bugs related to our integration with Elementor.

WooCommerce SEO: material structured data

When working on your ecommerce store, you need help from the WooCommerce SEO add-on for Yoast SEO. This helps you finetune your online store and improves the product structured data that Google needs to present your products in the search results.

Besides updating it for the above-mentioned new feature in WooCommerce, weâ€™ve added two enhancements that make WooCommerce SEO even better. Recently, Google added support for material in the product structured data, which lets you specify what material your product is made of. This gives Google more details about your product; we all know the more information you provide, the better.

Simply follow these steps to try it out:
Activate Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO for WooCommerce

Go to the dashboard and click on Yoast SEO > WooCommerce SEO

Set the Material option to Product Material

Go to Products > Attributes

Add a new attribute and name it Material

Add a product material, like Wood

Go to Products -> Add new

Set a name and a price for the product, choose Material from the custom attributes, and select Wood

Go to the product page, inspect the source code and scroll down to the Product schema structured data

Tadaa! Youâ€™ll notice the material property in the Product schema. This should be set to the product material wood
Hereâ€™s what that looks like in the Schema Validator:

The material is now available in your product structured data thanks to WooCommerce SEO

Local SEO for Yoast SEO

Local SEO is the add-on you need if you focus on getting your business noticed locally. The Local SEO plugin helps you get all your business details in order â€” like opening hours and maps â€” and translates those details into structured data that Google can use to highlight in the search results. In this release, we’ve fixed several minor issues to keep Local SEO in top shape.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.10 and the others

Today, weâ€™re releasing updates to most of our plugins. These updates come with loads of fixes and enhancements to help you make the most of your work! Update now to get the latest and greatest.

The post Yoast SEO, Local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO updates appeared first on Yoast.
08.11.2022