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Yoast SEO

By Team Yoast

Description

Yoast SEO: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin

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

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

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

GET AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

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

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

TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

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

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

WRITE KILLER CONTENT WITH YOAST SEO

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

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

KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE

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

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

TRUST THE EXPERTS

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

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

GET PREMIUM SUPPORT

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

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

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

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

OUR EXTENSIONS TO FURTHER IMPROVE YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Check out these SEO add-ons by Yoast:

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

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

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

INTEGRATIONS

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

BUG REPORTS

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

READ MORE

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

Screenshots

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

Installation

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

INSTALL YOAST SEO FROM WITHIN WORDPRESS

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

INSTALL YOAST SEO MANUALLY

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

AFTER ACTIVATION

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

FAQ

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

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

How can I add my website to Google Search Console?

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

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

How do I implement Yoast SEO breadcrumbs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I noindex URLS?

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

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

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

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

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

How often is Yoast SEO updated?

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

How do I get support?

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

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

Read more on how to get support

I have a different question than listed here

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

Reviews

BUG…

May 5, 2021
Many bug especially when you change some default settings. For example try this steps: 1. Disable yoast sitemap. 2. Enable yoast sitemap again. 3. Uninstall yoast plugin. 4. See your wp-sitemap.xml it will be broken. You need to install yoast then disable yoast sitemap, then uninstall yoast again. It will work. So from that experience, when yoast cause problem for your site, You cant just fix it easily with uninstalling yoast. Yoast will find other way to make your site broken.

outputs wrong og:url

May 5, 2021
Recently discovered that Yoast is adding a trailing slash to the open graph and schema url even though my posts don't have one. Google sees a url with a trailing slash and without as two separate urls. This is a disruptive linking signal that results in possible link equity dilution and URL cannibalization. Reached out to Yoast and they basically said "too bad", not enough people are complaining about it to fix it. Not sure why it would be so hard to USE THE ACTUAL POST URL as the og:url and in the schema. Seems like this should be a no-brainer to fix. Really disappointed in Yoast.

Absolute Disaster. Fine Free – Fails When You Pay

May 4, 2021
Had the free version. Worked well enough for us to try the premium version. That's the way it's supposed to work, right? Wrong in this case. There is a process to "Start SEO Optimization" on your site. You click that in the premium version and it fails every time --- and has been failing for quite some time. Years maybe. Do a quick search in the forums for "SEO data optimization." You will find post after post of users with this issue. Their reply is always, ALWAYS the same knowing full well that the solution does not work as the users indicate in their frustrated replies. This plugin is being uninstalled and we will search for another solution that might actually work. As for the 5 star reviews I would ask the question of how many of them are rating the FREE plugin which works fine in its limited capacity. I am beyond pissed that I had to PAY for this plugin and this lesson. From now on I will read the support forums BEFORE a plugin developer takes my money.
Read all 27,343 reviews

Contributors & Developers

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

Contributors

“Yoast SEO” has been translated into 50 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Yoast SEO” into your language.

Interested in development?

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

Changelog

16.3

Release Date: May 18th, 2021

Out now: Yoast SEO 16.3! This release helps you with one of the key aspects of modern SEO: Structured data. Yoast SEO 16.3 comes with a lot of enhancements for the Schema.org implementation. Enjoy! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.3 in our release post!

Enhancements:

  • Adds the Table of Contents accessibility feature to the Article Schema with a fallback to the WebPage Schema, when using the Yoast Table of Contents block.
  • Adds the url property to the Author Schema on a post when author archives are enabled.
  • Adds the wordCount and thumbnailUrl attributes to Article schema pieces.
  • Allows adding multiple FAQ blocks to a post or page.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixes a bug where a malformed Organization piece would be added to the Schema output if the company logo was an unsupported image.
  • Fixes a bug where we would accidentally include unminified CSS files in the zip. This led to an unnecessary zip size increase.
  • Fixes a bug where the complete options array could be re-saved in the database at each frontend request.
  • Fixes a bug where both noindex and index values could be added to the robots meta tag on the WordPress login screen.
  • Fixes a rare bug where the name property could be missing in the breadcrumb Schema due to plugin conflicts.

Other:

  • Adds the yoast_display_gutenberg_compat_notification filter to allow disabling the Gutenberg compatibility notification.
  • Adds the wpseo_schema_person_data filter to enable the filtering of Person Schema by the user’s ID.
  • Adds the Yoast\WP\SEO\admin_post_types_archive action at the end of the archive section of the custom post types in Search Appearance.
  • Deprecates the wpseo_admin_page_meta_post_types action in favor of the new Yoast\WP\SEO\admin_post_types_beforearchive action.
  • Deprecates the wpseo_admin_page_meta_taxonomies action in favor of the new Yoast\WP\SEO\admin_taxonomies_meta action.
  • Improves the layout of the Search Appearance collapsibles.
  • Improves spacing between settings sections in the Search Appearance page.
  • Replaces all occurrences of ‘SEMrush’ by ‘Semrush’ to reflect Semrush’s rebranding.

16.2

Release Date: April 28th, 2021

Say hi to Yoast SEO 16.2! This release focuses on improving stability and fixing several bugs. It also includes several enhancements. Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.2 in our release post!

Enhancements:

  • Enables/disables auto-updates for the ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin when auto-updates for Yoast SEO are enabled/disabled.
  • Improves the accessibility of the social sharing links in the post publish panel.
  • Changes the output of the articleSection and keywords attributes of the Article schema to an array instead of comma-separated values.
  • Improves the performance by optimizing the way Article schema is built, saving a query on pageload.

Bugfixes:

  • Fixes a bug where saving posts containing URLs without protocol would fail or trigger warnings.
  • Fixes a bug where the current webpage would not always be referenced correctly in the breadcrumb schema output.
  • Fixes a bug where robots metadata were not returned when requesting metadata via our get_head REST route.
  • Fixes a bug where the primary term isn’t saved at the right moment resulting in having an unexpected term for the breadcrumbs.
  • Fixes a bug where our add-ons would not automatically be updated if Yoast SEO was the first plugin for which the user ever enabled auto-updates.

Other:

  • Adds the 'wpseo_enable_editor_features_' . $post_type filter to allow users to show the Yoast SEO metabox on non-public post types if these are accessible. Props to jondcampbell.

Earlier versions

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

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Issues resolved in last two months:

609 out of 680

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