Tag: Yoast SEO Premium

Yoast SEO 14.6: New languages with word form support

Edwin Toonen

We have a new release for you: Yoast SEO 14.6. This release has some pretty cool enhancements, plus new additions for Yoast SEO Premium users. We’re continuing our run of languages that get word form support with two new ones: Indonesian and Portuguese. Find what’s new in Yoast SEO 14.6!

Word form recognition in Yoast SEO Premium

We all know high-quality content is essential for any site. Producing that amazing content, however, is not always so easy. For many of you, writing doesn’t come natural, so you welcome help with open arms. This is one of the reasons why we introduced the readability analyses way back when.

The analyses work well and give you advice you can count on, but, sometimes, it can feel as if you are trying to please the machine and not the human, so to say. We get that. Text analysis and recognition is hard, but we’ve managed to make a lot better with word form support in Yoast SEO Premium. Thanks to this, the plugin can now recognize different grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase, making it easier to optimize your text. Plus, as a Premium user you also get to use the synonyms and related keyphrase feature.

As of Yoast SEO 14.6, if you write in Indonesian or Portuguese, you can get a more flexible, natural writing and editing environment. All these tools are fine-tuned to help you build the best possible content, without having to think about awkwardly fitting in keywords to get green bullets.

Wondering how that works? Check out the videos! Yes, we did a video for each language:

List of languages

The list of languages that have word form support is getting longer and longer, with more on the way!

  • English (since Yoast SEO 9.0)
  • German (since Yoast SEO 10.1)
  • Dutch (since Yoast SEO 13.4)
  • Spanish (since Yoast SEO 13.5)
  • French (in beta, since Yoast SEO 14.1)
  • Russian (in beta since Yoast SEO 14.2)
  • Italian (in beta since Yoast SEO 14.3)
  • Indonesian (in beta since Yoast SEO 14.6)
  • Portuguese (in beta since Yoast SEO 14.6)

In beta: help us improve!

In Yoast SEO 14.6, we’re adding two new languages: Portuguese and Indonesian. Again, this is a beta release, and we’d like you to help us improve it. Now, we can find and recognize word forms in Portuguese and Indonesian much better than before, but not as good as the other languages we’ve implemented. That might mean that we don’t recognize every word correctly or that you’re noticing false-positives. If you find that happens, let us know!

There’s a feedback option below the focus keyphrase field that you can use to contact us. Please send us:

  • The focus keyphrase you’ve used for this specific piece of text.
  • The sentence in which you’ve noticed one of the assessments working incorrectly for the focus keyphrase you mentioned above.

You can do this for all languages now in beta: French, Russian, Italian, Indonesian and Portuguese.

You can send us your feedback if you find Yoast SEO doesn’t properly recognize keyphrases

Improving editing

In Yoast SEO 14.5, we introduced a new publishing flow that helps you keep track of your SEO scores during every part of the publication process. In Yoast SEO 14.6, we’ve added another helpful indicator that lets you see your scores for a particular post — quickly. We made the plugin icon in the editor reflect the SEO and Readability score. Cool, right? We’ve also improved the editing experience in the Social tab and give that part a dab of fresh paint.

Instantly see the scores for the post you’re working on by looking at the Yoast SEO icon

Languages improvements

Yoast SEO 14.6, comes with a number of language improvements. For example, we’ve improved the transition words analysis for Russian, and we’ve improved keyphrase counting in Indonesian. We’ve also rewritten the feedback for the keyphrase in title assessment to make it clear that an exact keyphrase match is necessary. Finally, we’ve improved recognition of keywords that contain a hyphen in the slug (for example: re-duplicated, on-the-go).

Other fixes and enhancements

There’s a lot of other stuff to find in this release and, as always, you can find all changes in the changelog. One of the most interesting is that we’re now automatically noindexing the xmlrpc.php file in WordPress and all possible ways to request it, removing them from Google’s search results. This prevents Google from unnecessarily trying to index these feeds.

In the sharing metadata used for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and many other sites, we now output the post title instead of the SEO title. This prevents the brand name from being added in most cases, which is better on those platforms. Of course, you can still set a specific sharing title on the Social tab of the Yoast SEO post settings.

Yoast SEO 14.6: Cool stuff

That’s it for Yoast SEO 14.6! In this release, you’ll find many fixes and enhancements. We made a number of improvements to our handling of languages. For our Premium users, we added word form support for Indonesian and Portuguese — bringing the total of supported languages to nine.

We hope you enjoy Yoast SEO.

The post Yoast SEO 14.6: New languages with word form support appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 14.5: New internal linking blocks for Premium

Edwin Toonen

Yoast SEO 14.5 is out today! In this release, we fixed a number of bugs, disabled the XML sitemaps that will arrive in WordPress 5.5 and added two new block editor blocks for our Premium users. These blocks help you with internal linking for hierarchical pages. Let’s find out more!

Meet the new internal linking blocks

We all know internal linking is very important as it is helps you build your site structure, making your site easier to digest for both humans as well as machines. We have several tools that help you improve your internal linking and today, we’re adding two internal linking blocks for the block editor that can help you improve it even further. Meet the Subpages block and the Siblings block!

A new Premium feature to improve internal linking

If you work with a lot of hierarchical post types, you’re often linking to underlying pages or to sibling pages. We thought of a way to make that process easier to do and we came up with two different — but related — blocks for working with subpages and sibling pages.

You can find the new Yoast Internal Linking Blocks in the block editor

The new blocks in Yoast SEO 14.5 are very easy to use and basically do what they say on the tin. The Subpages block lists all the subpages that have that particular page as a parent. So, if I have a page about Italian food, I might have subpages like this:

  • Italian food
    • Pasta
    • Pizza
    • Soup
    • Bread

Adding the Subpages block to the page, automatically presents all these subpages in a neat list.

The Subpages automatically lists the subpages that have the Italian food page as a parent

You can add the Siblings block to any of the subpages to list the siblings of the page you’ve added it to. So, if you add it to the pasta page, it’ll automatically list the related pages, in this case pizza and soup.

The Siblings block automatically a list with links to the other siblings of the Italian food parent page

Now, you can link all hierarchically related content by simply adding a block! The blocks only work on hierarchical pages, not on blog posts.

Want to read more about working with hierarchical pages? Read Willemien’s post on parent and child pages: Linking hierarchical post types for SEO.

Make the blocks yours with CSS!

While the blocks in their naked form might seem a bit awkward for some purposes, you can style them with CSS to your hearts content. For instance, by using a bit of additional CSS you can turn them into something like this:

A bit of CSS turns the blocks into an eyecatcher for your site

You don’t need much to come to the above result. For reference, find the CSS below. Remember, you can easily add custom CSS via the theme customizer in WordPress.

.yoast-url-list { 
	display: flex;
	flex-wrap: wrap;
	list-style: none;
}
.yoast-url-list li {
	margin: 0 10px 10px 0;
	flex: 1 1 30%;
	background: #FFF;
	border-radius: 3px;
	box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px #CCC;
}
.yoast-url-list li a {
	padding: 7px 10px;
	display: block;
	text-decoration: none;
}
.yoast-url-list li a:hover {
	background: #EFEFEF;
}

Disabling WordPress core XML sitemaps

With WordPress 5.5, XML sitemaps make their way into WordPress core. Of course, that’s good news for the web. Together with Google, we spearheaded the project of bringing XML sitemaps to core and we’re proud that the moment has come that every WordPress site will get an XML sitemap. Now, a large part of the web will be a much friendlier place for crawlers!

As awesome as the core XML sitemaps may be, we’ve decided to disable these for Yoast SEO users and we’re continuing to use our own XML sitemaps. Our XML sitemaps are more sophisticated, integrated, and automated, that’s why we decided to disable the core WordPress XML sitemap for our users.

You can read more about this decision in our FAQ on XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5 and Yoast SEO.

That’s Yoast SEO 14.5

In Yoast SEO 14.5, Premium users can enjoy two new blocks for the block editor: the Subpages and Siblings blocks. These can help improve internal linking for hierarchical pages. They are extremely easy to use, but powerful!

We’ve also chosen to continue to use our own XML sitemaps over those in WordPress 5.5 as ours are fully developed, fast and flexible. We think these’ll serve your site best.

Thanks for using Yoast SEO!

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Yoast SEO 14.4: An improved publishing flow

Edwin Toonen

Sometimes, you have releases that start out small and end up with a substantial improvement. Yoast SEO 14.4 is one such release. Initially plannend as a bug fix release, this turned into something that markedly improves the publishing workflow in WordPress. Plus, you can now mark your external links as nofollow or sponsored. You see, Yoast SEO 14.4 is a chockfull release!

A new flow for your SEO-optimized content

Yoast SEO helps you optimize your content to make it awesome for readers as well as search engines. Over the years, Yoast SEO quickly turned into one of the most used writing tools in the world. We’re very proud of that, but we felt there were a couple steps missing from the publishing flow. Plus, we noticed people struggling to find our sidebar in the block editor. Our CTO, Omar Reiss, came up with the concept for improving this and built most of it himself — we even dubbed this The Omar Release internally. Thanks to him, we now have a flow that gives you more SEO insights throughout the publishing process.

One of the most important parts of Yoast SEO is the feedback you get from the SEO analysis and readability analysis. These tools make sure that your content is up to scratch. Now, we make sure that these scores are visible in a number of additional steps. In short, here are the three steps:

  • See how your content scores straight from the Document sidebar in the block editor.
  • Ready to publish? Get reassurance about the quality of your post and make adjustments if you’re not happy yet.
  • Done? Publish the post and immediately share it on Twitter and Facebook via our new sharing buttons.

Here’s how that looks:

By adding SEO scores to these steps, we give you a better handle on your content quality. This is very helpful — sometimes you just need a little positive feedback to hit that publish button!

CTO Omar Reiss on the publishing flow

Did you know we have a sidebar in the WordPress block editor? No? Well, you’re not alone. Omar Reiss, had this to say on that topic: “We’ve noticed for a while that users new to the block editor have trouble finding our sidebar. In the Classic Editor, we’ve always been visible in the publishing screen, but for the block editor, we made an entire sidebar for Yoast SEO. To reach this, you needed to click the big Y logo on the top of the screen. In Yoast SEO 14.4, we’re making it much easier to find by integrating it in the Document sidebar. Now, you immediately see the familiar bullets once you open a post.”

We’re not just making Yoast SEO easier to find, but we’re also guiding people more. Omar: “SEO is crucial in the content publication process. We believe in holistic SEO and SEO plays a part in every step of the process. I’m happy that we can help people remember to work on that. Every post benefits from looking at it with an eye for SEO and the publication flow helps you do that. In addition, that final check makes sure that you can publish you content without hesitation!”

Omar didn’t just came up with the idea of these improvements, but he also built them himself. Omar explains: “I’ve been getting back into programming and for this project I had the chance to work with a couple of interesting Gutenberg APIs. These helped me to get everything going pretty quickly. I have to say, from an extensibility perspective, Gutenberg is maturing quickly! Soon, I’ll publish a blog post about my experiences with these Gutenberg APIs.”

Mark outgoing links with nofollow/sponsored

The second addition is an easy way to block search engines from following outgoing links by setting them as nofollow or even sponsored. It has always been a good idea to mark external links as nofollow — especially if these lead to pages you don’t really endorse. In addition, you can use these signal that these links might have been commercial and you don’t want search engines to follow these.

Recently, Google announced a new way to mark commercial links as such: sponsored. It is not mandatory to mark links you paid for with this new attribute, but it helps Google get a better sense of what happens with links on the web.

In the WordPress block editor, you can now easily mark links as nofollow. In addition, you can also mark these as sponsored in Yoast SEO 14.4. When you mark a link as sponsored, it automatically also applies a nofollow to that link. This is according to Google’s guidelines.

See it in action below:

More background in our help documentation on which link setting you should use. Tomorrow, we publish a new post on our SEO blog that goes into this in more detail.

Sharing on social media

You can see third new feature as part of the publishing flow mentioned above, but I’d still like to highlight it separately. In Yoast SEO 14.4, we made it much easier to share your freshly published post on social media like Twitter and Facebook. After you’ve hit Publish, you will be greeted with a new Share your post setting. Simply click the Facebook or Twitter icon to publish your new masterpiece to the corresponding platform.

Published your brand-new post? Make sure to let your audience know about it by directly sharing it on social media

Yoast SEO 14.4: More SEO insights

That’s Yoast SEO 14.4 for you! This release comes with a better workflow for publishing SEO-proof articles, including a new way to share your content on social media. In addition, we made it a lot easier for you to discourage search engines from following external links.

The post Yoast SEO 14.4: An improved publishing flow appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 14.3: Italian word forms in beta

Edwin Toonen

The biggest eye-catcher in Yoast SEO 14.3 is word form support for the Italian language in the Premium analysis. This makes it language number seven to make use of this awesome feature. Find out all about it! Plus, Yoast SEO 14.3 comes with improved French word form support and a number of bug fixes.

Another language gets word form support

Over the past months, we’ve been quickly expanding our line-up of languages that support the word form feature in Yoast SEO Premium. For the first four languages — English, German, Dutch and Spanish —, we custom developed the word recognition functionality. This takes a lot of time and effort to get this right for every language.

As of Yoast SEO 14.1, we’re adding languages at an earlier stage and asking our users for feedback to build upon and improve. This way, you can already use the word form recognition features, while we continually make it better.

In Yoast SEO 14.3, we’re adding another language: this time it’s Italian! Again, this is a beta release and we’d like you to help us improve it. Now, we can find and recognize word forms in Italian much better than before, but not as good as the other languages we’ve implemented. That might mean that we don’t recognize every word correctly or that you’re noticing false-positives. If you find that happens, let us know!

Yoast SEO Premium: Word form support for Italian

As of today, Italian language users can use Yoast SEO Premium in 14.3 to get a more flexible, natural writing and editing environment. Besides, the possibility to optimize your text with synonyms and related keyphrases should not be understated. All these tools are fine-tuned to help you build the best possible content, without having to think about awkwardly fitting in keywords to get green bullets.

Yes, I want the Yoast SEO Premium analysis »

Curious what this all means? Check out this video, that’ll explain everything for you!

As of today, the full list of languages that have word form recognition support in Yoast SEO Premium:

Feedback button is live

The last couple of languages we’ve added word form support form received a beta status. For these releases, we’ll allow users to provide feedback to signal improvements. Once again, we’d like to ask Yoast SEO Premium users in the French, Italian and Russian languages to send us your findings. Together, we make word form support an even better tool for everyone!

If you use Yoast SEO Premium in French, Italian or Russian, you can see the new feedback option just below the focus keyphrase field. Simply click the link, and fill in the fields in the popup. We’re asking you to supply us with the following:

  • The focus keyphrase you’ve used for this specific piece of text.
  • The sentence in which you’ve noticed one of the assessments working incorrectly for the focus keyphrase you mentioned above.

That’s all! We’ll make sure to put your feedback to good use. It’ll help us improve your language. Here’s what that feedback option looks like:

You can now send us your feedback on word form recognition from the post editor

Improved French word forms

The first language for which we released word forms in beta, was French. We’ve received a bunch of feedback for this and — combined with our own research and enhancements —, we made a number of improvements. In Yoast SEO Premium 14.3, we can more easily:

  • recognize keywords in words ending in -is/us/os.
  • recognize keyphrases containing words ending in “ent” in the text.
  • recognize word forms in short French words (e.g. ours – our; âmes – âme).

Thanks to everyone who sent us feedback and keep it coming!

Bug fixes and code improvements

In every release of Yoast SEO, we fix bugs and find other ways to enhance our code. For instance, we’re always working on quality assurance, code styling and other behind the scenes work. In addition, we fix bugs because they often need fixing. Sometimes they can be as small making sure the itemlist in our FAQ schema output now correctly counts up from one. Find the complete list of changes in the changelog.

Yoast SEO 14.3: get it now!

One of our main goals is to steadily improve language support in Yoast SEO. Over a number of releases, we added word form recognition support for Italian, Russian and French, with more to come.

The post Yoast SEO 14.3: Italian word forms in beta appeared first on Yoast.

Celebrating 10 years of Yoast: 20% off everything!

Marieke van de Rakt

Woohoo! Yoast’s 10th birthday is coming up on the 28th of May 2020! You might have seen our celebration calendar over the last month, where we’ve taken a trip down memory lane. And we’re so happy that you’re along for the ride. As a thank you, we’d love to give you a gift: for the next few days, you’ll receive a 20% discount on ALL Yoast products!

My personal recommendations

1. Yoast SEO Premium

Joost created the original WordPress SEO plugin back in 2010. And to this day, it’s our most popular plugin. It’s even the #1 WordPress SEO plugin out there! We’re super proud of all the amazing things this plugin can do for your site. You’ll be able to:

  • Optimize your site for the right keywords
  • Avoid dead links in your site with the redirect manager
  • Get previews for sharing on social media
  • Receive content quality and link suggestions – as you write!
Get Yoast SEO Premium now at 20% off! ▸

This is a limited-time offer, so get it while it lasts!

2. Yoast SEO: readability analysis

Our mission at Yoast is “SEO for everyone”, which is why I want to highlight one of my favorite features of the free version of Yoast SEO: the readability analysis. This analysis makes sure that your text is easy to read for your readers. Why?

Readability determines whether people understand the message you’re trying to get across with your text. And trust me, this is important for your SEO and sales. So make sure to use this feature in Yoast SEO to write excellent, SEO-proof copy!

Install the free version of Yoast SEO ▸

3. Yoast SEO academy Premium subscription

In 2015, we launched the Yoast SEO Academy, which was sort of my Yoast-baby at the time. The online SEO training courses in Academy teach you vital SEO skills you can apply right away. Do you want to learn everything there is to know about SEO? Our Premium training subscription includes:

  • All content SEO training courses
  • All technical SEO training courses
  • The latest SEO news from our experts
Get the SEO Premium training subscription now at 20% off ▸

This is a limited-time offer, so get it while it lasts!

4. Yoast SEO academy Content subscription

If you know me, you’ll know that I’m crazy about content. Trust me, content SEO should be a key part of your SEO strategy! Because without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. That’s why we’ve created the Yoast SEO academy Content subscription, which focuses on content SEO. The courses in this subscription teach you everything you need to know to create awesome SEO content. This subscription includes:

  • Keyword research training
  • SEO copywriting training
  • Site structure training
  • All-around SEO training
  • The latest SEO news

Get the Content SEO training subscription ▸

These are my personal favorites and I hope that they’ll become your favorites too! But, there’s more! Have you heard about our local SEO plugin? Or the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin? Check out our overview of all products that you can now purchase with a 20% discount!

Claim your 20% discount now! ▸

This is a limited-time offer, so get it while it lasts!

The post Celebrating 10 years of Yoast: 20% off everything! appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 14.2: Russian word forms in beta

Edwin Toonen

Our linguists are busy bees lately. Over the last couple of releases, we’ve launched word form support for Yoast SEO Premium users writing in Spanish and French. These languages follow the languages that already had word form support: English, German and Dutch. In Yoast SEO 14.2, we’re adding yet another language: Russian! And, once again, this is a beta release and we’d like to ask you to help us improve it.

Russian word forms, now in beta

High-quality content is essential for getting your site noticed by readers and search engines alike. Making your content awesome can be hard, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-optimizing your articles by using your focus keyphrase over and over again. Writing like this leads to content that’s hard to read. Since adding our readability analysis, Yoast SEO helps you to circumvent these problems and improve your writing. Yoast SEO Premium takes that to another level and enables you to turn into a lean, mean writing machine.

The Premium analysis makes the writing process much more natural. It’s flexible and smart, helping you improve your articles without having to go to great lengths to fit in your focus keyphrases awkwardly. As of 14.2, Yoast SEO Premium is much better at finding your focus keyphrases in Russian, even if the words are in a different grammatical form — and spread across a sentence. Of course, this is a beta release, so there might be instances where Yoast SEO doesn’t correctly find a word. If you encounter this — or if you have any suggestions for improvements — please contact us.

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis also comes with support for synonyms and related keyphrases. Using synonyms in your text makes the content come alive and reduces the need for repetition of your main focus keyphrase. By also adding related keyphrases, you can paint a complete picture of your subject, making the text rich and authoritative.

Getting good feedback on your Russian writing is now much easier

Yoast employs several Russian colleagues. One of them works on the team that develops the language part of the plugin, so we thought it would be awesome if she introduces the Russian word forms feature for our Russian audience.

Interested? Get Yoast SEO Premium now! »

Help us improve language support

As a reminder, we’d like to ask you once again to help us improve word form support for new languages. The launch of Russian word forms — like the release of French in Yoast SEO 14.1 — consists of a beta version that we’re improving and expanding as we go. We use this first release to get Russian up and running. Now, we can find and recognize word forms in Russian much better than before, but not as good as the other languages we’ve implemented. That might mean that we don’t recognize every word correctly or that you’re noticing false-positives. If you find things like this, we’d like to know!

To help us collect your insights and experiences, we’re working on a unique language feedback system inside the plugin. That’s not done yet, so until then, you can send us your improvements via email.

While sending us your feedback, please include the following:

  • The focus keyphrase you’ve used for this specific piece of text.
  • The sentence in which you’ve noticed one of the assessments working incorrectly for the focus keyphrase you mentioned above.

Our team of linguists will do the rest. Thanks for your help!

Improvements in Yoast SEO 14.2

Among other things, we’ve fixed several issues with breadcrumbs. One of these bugs turned the order of breadcrumbs on its head, which is not something we like. Things should work as expected now. We’ve also changed how we check if a focus keyphrase was used before. We currently run this against our indexable table, making the process more efficient.

Update now to Yoast SEO 14.2

We’ve added a new language to Yoast SEO Premium: Russian. Now, those writing in the Russian language can enjoy a more flexible, natural way of improving their posts. We have many more languages coming up! Remember, if you have feedback on these beta language releases, please let us know. We want to make everything work flawlessly, so we need your help.

The post Yoast SEO 14.2: Russian word forms in beta appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 14.1 adds French word forms in beta

Edwin Toonen

Yoast SEO uses sophisticated language analysis tools to help you optimize your texts. Most checks work for any language, but our Premium analysis relies on word recognition functionality, which we develop custom for every language. It takes a lot of time to get this perfect for every language out there. Starting with French in Yoast SEO 14.1, we decided to try something new and just ship what we have. This way you can already benefit from better keyphrase recognition, and we’ll allow you to give us feedback to help improve support for your language faster!

Yoast SEO Premium: Better analysis for French

Over the last couple of releases, we’ve talked a lot about word form support for different languages. Thanks to the Premium SEO Analysis, the plugin recognizes your focus keyphrase in a text, even if that word is in a different form. In French, that means we will be able to detect all these word forms, which helps you quickly improve your content. Today, we’re launching a beta version of the word form feature in French. We’ll allow users to help us improve it, more on that below.

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis makes it easier to improve your text. It helps you write a perfect blog post, and it does so in a much more transparent way. Combine this with the synonyms and related keyphrases feature, and you have an excellent tool that is intensely satisfying to work with!

Check out the video, featuring our good friend and renowned SEO expert Jason Barnard!

Get the Yoast SEO Premium analysis now »

Now available for five languages

We now support word forms in the following languages:

Of course, we have more language on the way. We collected all the supported languages in our SEO analysis on our features per language page.

Help us improve language support

The launch of French word forms consists of a beta version that we’re improving and expanding as we go. We use this first release to get French up and running. Now, we can find and recognize word forms in French much better than before, but not as good as the other languages we’ve implemented. That might mean that we don’t recognize every word correctly or that you’re noticing false-positives. If you find things like this, we’d like to know!

To help us collect your insights and experiences, we’re working on a special language feedback system inside the plugin. That’s not done yet, so until then you can send us your improvements via email.

While sending us your feedback, please include the following:

  • The focus keyphrase you’ve used for this specific piece of text.
  • The sentence in which you’ve noticed one of the assessments working incorrectly for the focus keyphrase you mentioned above.

Our team of linguists will do the rest.

In Yoast SEO 14.1, we’ve not only added a new language to our word forms roster but also improved the Dutch language version. Another language-based improvement is an updated list of Hungarian transition words.

Improving on Yoast SEO 14.0

Curious about what happened with Yoast SEO 14.0? Read Joost’s post Yoast SEO 14.0.x; or “Why you should never bypass wpdb”.

Despite weeks and weeks of testing Yoast SEO 14.0, there were still some people running into issues. In Yoast SEO 14.1, out today, we’re improving things to help stabilize the plugin.

Among other things, we’re making several changes regarding the indexables. In the backend, we’re making it clearer what the process actually does and what you as a user can expect. We’ve also made it possible to show debug information that gives an idea of what went wrong in the indexing process in case you run into issues.

We’ve made several improvements to the indexing process itself. For instance, we’re preventing duplicate indexables to enter the database table. Plus, we’re no longer building indexables from taxonomies that aren’t public. We’ve also added the option te reindex a site’s content from the CLI.

In addition, we fixed several bugs regarding the publication and presentation of breadcrumbs, in Schema and elsewhere. In addition, we fixed several bugs regarding the publication and presentation of breadcrumbs, in Schema and elsewhere. In the changelog for Yoast SEO 14.1, you’ll find a list of all the fixes and enhancements.

Yoast SEO 14.1: update now

That’s Yoast SEO 14.1 for you! In this release, we’ve fixed a number of bugs and made several improvements concerning the indexable release. In addition, we made several enhancements that’ll make the current version of Yoast SEO more stable and easier to use.

That’s not all, because we’ve also added another language to our ever-expanding list: French! Premium users who write in the French language can now enjoy a more flexible and natural writing and optimizing environment thanks to word form support. More languages on the way, so stay tuned. And don’t forget you can help add or improve your language!

The post Yoast SEO 14.1 adds French word forms in beta appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 14.0: Much faster thanks to ‘indexables’

Joost de Valk

Today is a special day. Today, a project we’ve been working on for a year sees the light of day. Yoast SEO 14.0 rewrites the playbook on how a WordPress SEO plugin can work. Thanks to an approach we call indexables, we bring you a much faster experience and a new foundation that helps us get ready for an exciting future!

Think like a search engine

SEO has always been about thinking like a search engine. Search engines want to retrieve as much information as possible, and use it to provide searchers with the best possible answers to their questions. This means we constantly have to ask ourselves; how does a search engine treat information? 

Meet The Indexables

Have you met our new superheroes The Indexables? Check out the Indexables comic!

Information on the web is addressable via URLs. Anything that has a URL is something that could be discovered, scraped, indexed, and shown in the search results. WordPress has posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, different types of archives, special pages, and maybe even more types of content. Do you think a search engine like Google cares about that? It doesn’t really. It just looks for things with a URL, that it can scrape and index.

A better information architecture for WordPress

From an SEO perspective, any type of page in WordPress is simply an indexable object. This is the basic intuition that has led to indexables. In its core, indexables is just a database table that contains metadata and URLs for all indexables on a site. The abstraction normalizes the information architecture for any type of page in WordPress and makes its metadata directly queryable. On top of that, we can now easily and economically relate different indexable objects to each other and to other things, such as links, redirects, attachments, and perhaps even schema markup.

Looking for more background on indexables and the future it holds? Read Omar’s post The exciting technology that is indexables

A direct benefit of indexables: a speed boost

While all the magic happens behind the scenes, the first notable ‘feature’ of indexables is a speed boost. With all the testing we’ve done, Yoast SEO 14.0 can provide a speed boost of 5-10%. Your entire site will load faster. Of course, this depends on various elements, like the type of site, the number of plugins installed, the hosting provider et cetera. This kind of speed boost is not only good for you, your visitors and your site in general, but also for search engines. Search engines have been advocating faster sites for a while now and with Yoast SEO 14.0 we can help you speed up your site as well.

After updating to Yoast SEO 14, we ask you to run the indexing process

A new architecture ready for new features

One of the main benefits of indexables is what we can build on top of it. Rethinking Yoast SEO with indexables in mind, helped us build a new information architecture that will allow us to add and expand sitewide SEO features. The architecture makes our code easier to maintain and improve, while also helping us build new and complex features more quickly. 

One of the first features built on top of indexables is our new headless WordPress API. Developers using headless WordPress installs can now generate metadata from a frontend request. Thanks to a simple metadata endpoint, developers can use the REST API to grab the data and output it wherever they want.

Improved API’s 

One of the indirect benefits of this release is new outside access to data. Thanks to the new architecture, we built a set of APIs that make it easier for third-party developers to hook into Yoast SEO. For this, we introduce surfaces. A surface is an object which we explicitly expose for third party use and which we promise to keep backward compatible. Find out more about surfaces in our developer documentation.

Technical background

As we’ve rebuilt a large part of the plugin, we have ample documentation for developers to come to grips with the changes. If you hook into Yoast SEO, it’s a good idea to go over our documentation and developer blog posts to see what changed and how you can use this to your advantage. This release makes it a lot easier for developers to hook into. Of course, this also applies to our Schema.org framework. Find more information in our developer documentation for Yoast SEO 14.0.

Try it out before updating

It’s important to test plugins before you update, but since this is a really big one it might be a good idea to try it out before adding it to your site. Of course, Yoast SEO 14.0 is thoroughly tested, but since we can’t test every set up out there, there’s always a chance that some rare combination of factors raises an issue. In that case, use a staging environment to test your plugins on a copy of your site. 

For developers and testers, we made our internal Yoast SEO Test Helper available as a plugin. This can help you test our plugins on your staging environment.

Yoast SEO 14.0: The Indexables release

Yoast SEO 14.0 is out of this world. We’ve rebuilt a large part of how the plugin gets its data, which helped us to make it faster and to help your site load faster. This innovative way of handling data inside WordPress helps us — and you — get ready for a very exciting future!

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What does Yoast SEO do?

Joost de Valk

The Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy for your site to meet the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest standards of SEO and overall readability. Here, we’ll discuss how our plugin helps you build the best website you possibly can!

Technical features of Yoast SEO

If technical SEO isn’t your strong suit, much of the following may not make sense to you. But, don’t worry! Yoast SEO exists to make sure you don’t have to know all of these things. The plugin settings are very sensible by default, and our configuration wizard also guides you through the steps to get your technical SEO settings right.

This means that by simply installing the plugin and following the steps in our wizard, you’re already fixing a lot of important technical SEO things for your site! That way you don’t have to know about technical things such as robots.txt, clean permalink URLs, htaccess files and sitemaps. Our plugin will take care of these for you. Furthermore, Yoast SEO also makes sure your site has:

  • canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content;
  • a valid Schema.org structured data implementation;
  • a noindex or nofollow option for every page;
  • OpenGraph tags for every page or article;
  • etc. etc. You can find a complete list of features here.

Update: Since the 11.0 release, Yoast SEO builds a full structured data graph for every post or page on your site! A graph is a complete piece of structured data with well-defined connections to all the different parts. Search engines now not only know what all the parts mean but also how they fit together. Want to know what it does for your website? Read all about Yoast SEO 11.0!

If you are (a bit more) familiar with technical SEO, you might enjoy reading more about Yoast SEO’s hidden features that secretly level up your SEO. And if you want to dive deeper and step up your technical SEO game, we also provide a technical SEO training course that will help you on your way. 

Yoast SEO improves your content SEO

Once your plugin is installed and configured, it’s time to get started with your content. Important to remember is that the plugin helps you with your rankings, but they still rely on your content. This means you have to create good content for the right keywords.

After you’ve done your keyword research, you’ll have to start optimizing the pages and posts on your sites for the keywords and key phrases you want to rank for. To do that, you can set a focus keyphrase for an article in Yoast SEO. Then, the plugin uses our content SEO analyses to determine how your content scores on different ranking factors, such as how many times you use your keyphrase, the length of your text or whether you used any internal links.

With this analysis, the plugin is able to tell you how you can optimize your post or page to rank with that keyphrase. And does this by using red, orange and green bullets to indicate how every factor scores. This gives you an easy overview of the overall score and what you can still tackle to increase your rankings!

The content SEO analysis tells you how to optimize your text for a certain keyword with the use of red, orange and green bullets. This is a screenshot of our Premium plugin.

Yoast SEO improves your readability

Optimizing your content to rank with the right keyphrase is important, but don’t forget your reader! Even if you write amazing content for search engines, your audience won’t benefit from it if they don’t understand it. When a person doesn’t understand your content, the chance of them buying something from you is close to zero. The same is true for the odds of them sharing one of your articles with their friends. So, you need to make sure your content is also easy to understand. And that’s where the readability features come in.

Yoast SEO’s readability features are well-researched analyses that give you feedback on how to optimize your writing. Now, this may sound strange, because the way you write can be very personal. So let me explain how it works. The plugin uses an algorithm to check your content on different factors that are proven to increase readability. We look at the use of transition words, the use of passive voice, your sentence and paragraph lengths and more. But we carefully crafted this algorithm to make it as accurate as possible without being too strict.

This means you’re able to adopt the feedback in a way that suits you and your content will still have your personal tone of voice. If you’re interested in all the factors that increase readability, you can read more about the Yoast SEO readability features.

The readability analysis tells you how to optimize your text to make it easy to read with the use of red, orange and green bullets. This is a screenshot of our Premium plugin.

A quick recap

In this article I’ve shown you what Yoast SEO can do for your site. To sum it up, it improves your technical SEO by taking care of a lot of technical things in the background. Secondly, our plugin helps you improve your content SEO by helping you set a keyphrase and telling you exactly how you can optimize your content to rank with this keyphrase. Lastly, our plugin helps you improve the readability of your content by providing feedback that you can easily incorporate into your own writing style.

I hope this article gives you some insight into our plugin and what it can do for you! It’s also worth noting that we offer two versions of our plugin, so have a look to decide which one suits you best. We offer a free version of the plugin, that will definitely get you started with your SEO. But I advise you to also take a glance at our Premium plugin to make sure you’re not missing out on the features that will get you that top position in the rankings.

Okay, I'm convinced. Show me to that Yoast SEO plugin!

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Yoast SEO 13.5 adds support for Spanish word forms

Edwin Toonen

While we’re working on getting Yoast SEO 14.0 ready for the world, you can enjoy today’s release of Yoast SEO 13.5. In this release, we’re adding word form support for a new language: Spanish. Spanish joins, Dutch, German and English, and we’re working on more languages. Read all about Yoast SEO 13.5!

An easier, more flexible text analysis

We’ve made our keyphrase analysis smart to make the process of editing a text with Yoast SEO more natural. More invisible, so to say, so you can focus on creating that epic piece of content. 

Thanks to the innovative way of working with language, the plugin is now much less restrictive in finding your focus keyphrase. It has become smarter. In the past, you often found yourself working according to the rules of the plugin, but not anymore. Now, you don’t have to try to fit your focus keyphrase awkwardly in a sentence to make the plugin happy. No, now the plugin recognizes all parts of your focus keyphrase automatically — and the words don’t even have to be in the same order.

That’s all happening in the free version of Yoast SEO, but Premium analysis ups the ante. Here, word form support comes into play. 

Yoast SEO Premium analysis 

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis not only picks out your focus keyphrases flawlessly inside a sentence, but it also looks at words forms of your keyphrase. Word forms can be anything, from plurals (e.g., perro – perros), verb forms (e.g., aplicar – apliques) to adverbs (e.g., actual – actualmente). 

Now, if you write naturally your focus keyphrase will become much easier to find because it looks at different forms as well. All these instances count towards the correct keyphrase density of your text. 

That’s not all, because Yoast SEO Premium offers something else that you can use in conjuncture with word forms: support for synonyms and related keyphrases. By adding different related keyphrases, you can write a text that fully covers your specific topic. This includes all relevant terms users use to talk about this subject.

Need a recap? Check out this video that explains it perfectly:

Word forms are now supported in:

We collected all the supported languages in our SEO analysis on our features per language page.

Help us improve Spanish support

Today, we introduce word form support for our Spanish language users. This version is fully functional and works really well, but it might still be a little rough around the edges. Please test it thoroughly and report back your findings.

In addition, we’d like your help adding word form support for other languages. Each language is different, so you need a new word form recognition mechanisms in each language. Up to now, our in-house team of linguists refined and adapted the word form recognition mechanism in each language until it delivered the best possible quality.

This process has a major advantage: you get the best quality right in the first release. But it also has a downside, as it takes a while before a word form mechanism can cope with all the intricacies and irregularities in a language. As we want to provide word form recognition in more and more languages, this process will take longer. To speed up the process, we are changing things for the upcoming languages.

In the future, we’re building on existing word form recognition mechanisms. We need your help, though. To improve these existing mechanisms, we’d like native speakers — or experts — in that language to give us feedback. We’re working on a new feedback system to allow you to send your suggestions or improvements from within the plugin. For now, if you encounter strange things or want to help out, you can send us an email, comment on this post or make an issue on our GitHub repository. Thanks!

Update to Yoast SEO 13.5

Yoast SEO 13.5 is out. In it, you’ll find a great enhancement for our Spanish language users: word form support! Word forms help you to write a better article while spending less time on making Yoast SEO happy, we hope. If not, please let us know so we can improve it.

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