Yoast SEO
Team Yoast By Team Yoast

April 11, 2023

Yoast SEO Plugin

Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the Yoast SEO plugin.

Yoast SEO: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin

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

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

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

GET AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

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

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

TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

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

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

WRITE KILLER CONTENT WITH YOAST SEO

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

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

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:

Installation

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

INSTALL YOAST SEO FROM WITHIN WORDPRESS

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

INSTALL YOAST SEO MANUALLY

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

AFTER ACTIVATION

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

Screenshots

  1. The modern interface makes Yoast SEO easy to work with.

    The modern interface makes Yoast SEO easy to work with.

  2. Easily manage how your posts and pages appear in SERPs.

    Easily manage how your posts and pages appear in SERPs.

  3. Yoast SEO Premium has extra crawl optimization options.

    Yoast SEO Premium has extra crawl optimization options.

  4. Yoast SEO integrates with tools like Semrush and Wincher.

    Yoast SEO integrates with tools like Semrush and Wincher.

  5. The famous SEO and readability analyses in Yoast SEO.

    The famous SEO and readability analyses in Yoast SEO.

  6. See what your post looks like in Google.

    See what your post looks like in Google.

  7. The First-time configuration helps you get started quickly.

    The First-time configuration helps you get started quickly.

  8. The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO.

    The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO.

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

What happens to my data if I enable usage tracking?

This page on yoast.com explains what data we collect to improve Yoast SEO. We only collect data when you explicitly opt in. Read more about how we handle your data in our Privacy Policy.

I have a different question than listed here

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

Changelog

20.5

Release date: 2023-04-11

Our latest release, Yoast SEO 20.5, includes enhancements and fixes to elevate your SEO journey. One of the most exciting updates is our improved Google SERP preview, now aligned with Google’s current styling for both mobile and desktop. This allows you to see how well your snippets are optimized for the search result pages. Read all about it! Find out more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 20.5 in our release post!

Enhancements

  • Updates mobile and desktop Google snippet previews to be in line with Google’s current styling.
  • Improves the recognition of keyphrases starting with a period (e.g., “.net developer”) by the keyphrase in title assessment.
  • Cleans up indexables that got orphaned because posts/terms/users got deleted while Yoast SEO was deactivated.

Bugfixes

  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when upgrading Yoast SEO while having Local SEO active but never executed.
  • Fixes a bug where, if a content pertaining to a deleted user is re-assigned to another user, the indexables related to the deleted user are not updated with the new author_id.
  • Fixes a bug where posts in Elementor would persistently require an update when a related keyphrase was added.
  • Fixes a bug where the Google preview would show a duplicate slug in the breadcrumbs when the slug included encoded characters.
  • Fixes a bug where the highlighting for the passive voice, sentence length, transition words, and inclusive language assessments would not be applied to the first sentence of a paragraph if the paragraph contained a new line character.
  • Fixes a bug where the highlighting would not be applied in the image captions in Classic editor when the match was found in the first sentence.
  • Fixes a bug where the highlighting would not be applied to the first sentence in Classic editor when an image without caption was added at the beginning of a paragraph.
  • Fixes a bug where the passive voice and transition words assessments would show an incorrect percentage in the feedback when a new line character was used inside a paragraph.

Other

  • Changes the last step of the First-time configuration to highlight the free webinar availability.
  • Drops compatibility with PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1.

20.4

Release date: 2023-03-28

With Yoast SEO 20.4, you can reduce your site’s carbon footprint and improve your SEO with just a few clicks. The crawl optimization settings let you turn off crawling for certain URLs, scripts, and metadata that WordPress automatically adds. Previously only available in Premium, but now available for all! Find out more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 20.4 in our release post!

Enhancements

  • NEW in Free: Adds the crawl optimization features to Yoast SEO Free, enabling 13M+ users to reduce their website’s carbon footprint!

Bugfixes

  • Adds a hook to adapt the meta query used to filter the post overview based on the focus keyphrase.
  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error related to HelpScout would be thrown when using a version of a Yoast add-on older than 2 years.
  • Fixes a bug where a PHP warning would be thrown when exporting Yoast settings.
  • Fixes a bug where the Google preview in the Block editor would show the post ID in the breadcrumbs when creating a new post, or it would show the slug twice or show auto-draft when creating a new page or custom post. This would only happen before (auto-)saving the post.
  • Fixes a bug where the previously used keyword assessment would potentially link to an empty page of results when the focus keyphrase had been used across different post types.

Other

  • Sets the WordPress tested up to version to 6.2.

Earlier versions

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

Download

Details

  • Version: 20.5
  • Active installations: 5,000,000
  • WordPress Version: 6.0
  • Tested up to: 6.2
  • PHP Version: 7.2.5

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