Yoast SEO: the #1 WordPress SEO plugin
Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Are you not entirely convinced? Yoast SEO is the favorite WordPress SEO plugin of millions of users worldwide!
As Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone, the plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.
DON’T LET YOUR COMPETITORS WIN
Do you know who your competitors are in your niche? There’s a reason why they are your competitors: they do what you do. And they might even do it better right now. That does not mean you can’t win from them, but it does mean you need all the help to get on top and stay on top! Yoast SEO is here to help you out as we’ve helped millions of people worldwide with their WordPress SEO efforts.
TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO
Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects and SEO experts work daily to improve the plugin with every release. Yoast SEO offers:
- Title and meta description templating for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
- A state-of-the-art Schema implementation helps search engines make sense of your site and increases the chance on those coveted rich results.
- The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
- Full control over your site’s breadcrumbs.
- Automatically set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.
- [Premium] support for our Yoast SEO Premium users.
- [Premium] the ability 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 readability analysis and its SEO analysis. Yoast SEO gives you:
- The SEO analysis: an invaluable tool to write SEO-friendly texts with the right (focus) keywords in mind.
- The readability analysis: make sure that you are writing easy-to-digest, engaging content for both visitors and search engines.
- Our snippet preview that shows you how your post or page will look in the search results. Even on mobile!
- An FAQ and HowTo block for the WordPress editor so search engines know when you are serving a FAQ page or HowTo guides.
- [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] The ability to optimize your article for synonyms and related keyphrases.
- [Premium] We now recognize different word forms of your keyphrase, like singular and plurals, but also different tenses of verbs (just in English for now). It helps you improve your text in a more natural way.
- [Premium] Automatic internal linking suggestions: write your article and automatically get suggested posts to link to!
KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE
Whether you are a business owner or blogger, a content creator, a developer or an SEO expert: Yoast SEO helps you keep your website in perfect shape. Yoast SEO:
- Tunes the engine of your website so you can focus on creating great content.
- Gives you cornerstone content and internal linking features to help you rank for the right keywords with the right pages.
- Helps you manage your team’s WordPress SEO efforts: with our SEO roles you can give colleagues access to specific sections of the Yoast SEO plugin.
- Has a bulk editor so you can make large-scale edits to the titles and meta descriptions of your website.
- Translates your content to structured data where possible to help search engines understand your website.
- [Premium] Gives you social previews to manage the way your page is shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
- [Premium] Has a full redirect manager to keep your site healthy by easily redirecting deleted pages and changed URLs.
Premium support
The Yoast team aims to provide regular support for the Yoast SEO plugin on the WordPress.org forums. But please understand that we do prioritize our premium support. This one-on-one email support is available to people who bought Yoast SEO Premium.
Did you know that the Yoast SEO Premium also has several extra features:
- It gives you the option to have synonyms and related keyphrases.
- A redirect manager that f.i. helps you prevent 404 Page Not Found errors.
- Internal linking suggestions while you write.
- Write more natural with our automatic recognition of word forms
- Cornerstone content checks to point search engines to your main pages.
The Yoast SEO Premium plugin is well worth your investment!
Our addons to further improve your WordPress SEO
You should also check out these other products by Yoast:
- Yoast Local SEO to optimize all website that serve a local audience, like certain small businesses, or businesses with multiple locations.
- Yoast Video SEO to make sure Google understands what you video is about, thus increasing your chances to rank in video results.
- Yoast News SEO for news publishers who want to improve their visibility and performance in Google News.
- WooCommerce SEO for all online shops that want to perform better in search engines and on social platforms.
They work with the FREE version of Yoast SEO already, and these premium extensions of course come with support too.
Oh, and don’t forget: our Yoast Academy is for all the business owners, bloggers and everyone else who wants to learn more about optimizing websites, improving their WordPress SEO and taking their online content to the next level.
Bug reports
Bug reports for Yoast SEO are welcomed in our WordPress SEO repository on GitHub. Please note that GitHub is not a support forum, and that issues that aren’t properly qualified as bugs will be closed.
Further Reading
For more info on search engine optimization and WordPress SEO in specific, check out the following:
- The Yoast SEO Plugin official homepage.
- The Yoast SEO Knowledgebase.
- WordPress SEO – The definitive Guide by Yoast.
- Other WordPress Plugins by the same team.
- Follow Yoast on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter.
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.
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
- Visit the plugins page within your dashboard and select ‘Add New’;
- Search for ‘Yoast SEO’;
- Activate Yoast SEO from your Plugins page;
- Go to ‘after activation’ below.
INSTALL YOAST SEO MANUALLY
- Upload the ‘wordpress-seo’ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory;
- Activate the Yoast SEO plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress;
- Go to ‘after activation’ below.
AFTER ACTIVATION
- You should see (a notice to start) the Yoast SEO configuration wizard;
- Go through the configuration wizard and set up the plugin for your site;
- You’re done!
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 knowledge base.
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:
`
if ( function_exists( ‘yoast_breadcrumb’ ) ) {
yoast_breadcrumb( ‘
‘,’
‘ );
}
?>
`
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: Home » Blog »
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 or knowledge base at kb.yoast.com.
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 knowledge base: kb.yoast.com.
dimitris 5 de Agosto de 2020
For everything SEO….
nestormarius 5 de Agosto de 2020
Because of it, my website is 100% SEO. Thanks!
Уроки WordPress 4 de Agosto de 2020
Этот плагин значительно повышает качество сайта в поисковых системах, таких как: Яндекс, Google и многих других. Плагин имеет множество полезных функций и настроек. Считаю его лучшим SEO плагином, так как в бесплатной версии доступны все необходимые функции, которые влияют на повышение эффективности сайта в глазах поисковиков.
yamaha-gic 4 de Agosto de 2020
It’s so useful for my SEO needs.. thanks.. Kredit motor honda
Diogo Pé 1 de Agosto de 2020
O Yoast é um dos melhores plugins para SEO. Vale muito a pena!
brightvesseldev 31 de Julio de 2020
We manage hundreds of WordPress and WooCommerce website this is our go-to for SEO.
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14.7
Release Date: August 5th, 2020
Say hi to Yoast SEO 14.7, chock-full of enhancements to help you with your site’s SEO. Have you heard about the addition of XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5? The Yoast SEO plugin is completely prepared for this. We also have some great news for users of the Web Stories plugin. Read more about those changes in our release post!
Enhancements:
- Adds support for adding metadata to Web Stories (the web-story post type) from the Web Stories plugin. Props to swissspidy
- Shows a more specific notification about why the reindexing of SEO data is needed when the permalinks are reset or when the category base setting is changed.
- Redirects requests to the WordPress sitemaps to the appropriate Yoast sitemap, if the Yoast sitemaps are enabled.
- Adds the option for users to opt-in to allow Yoast to track some data about their site.
- Optimizes script loading by removing ver parameters from scripts and styles when they’re not needed.
- Adds the Yoast logo to the Yoast block categories.
- Compatibility with WordPress 5.5: makes sure Yoast structured data blocks are found on more keywords and have examples in the block inserter.
Bugfixes:
- Fixes a bug where a fatal error would occur in sitemaps on sites where the home URL and site URL were different. Because the cause of this was a missing style sheet, the content of the sitemaps was still there, which means Google and other search engines could still reach the sitemaps and no SEO harm was done.
- Fixes a bug where reindexing would not be done for indexables without a permalink.
- Fixes a bug where an indexable’s permalink remained unchanged when the categories prefix option was changed.
- Fixes a bug where an inline link that opens in a new window would render undefined in the aria-label.
- Fixes a bug where the indexables indexing process could not be started again without a page reload on the tools page if it failed.
- Fixes a bug where a console error would be thrown because wpseoShortcodePluginL10n was not defined.
- Fixes a bug where the SEO and Readability scores were no longer shown in the publish box in the classic editor.
- Fixes a bug where clicking the Readability score link in the classic editor would trigger an error.
Other:
- Enables the cornerstone content toggle for taxonomies.
- Adds the option to filter our Schema by @type.
- Removes the setting to show the date in the Google Preview. The date will now always be shown in post-type previews.
- Moves the running of the SEO data indexing process to the Yoast Tools page.
14.6.1
Release Date: July 21st, 2020
Other:
- Reverts the change for social media titles to pick the post/page/term title, as this could inadvertently lead to low quality titles for some archives and other page types.
Bugfixes:
- Fixes a bug where the where all methods were removed from xmlrpc.php due to incorrect usage of add_action as opposed to add_filter.
14.6
Release Date: July 21st, 2020
We have a new release for you: Yoast SEO 14.6. This release has some pretty cool enhancements. For example, we’ve added another helpful indicator in the editor that shows you your scores for a particular post quickly. Read more about those changes in our release post!
Enhancements:
- Improves the editing experience in the Social tab, and gives it a dab of fresh paint.
- 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. You can still set a specific sharing title on the Social tab of the Yoast SEO post settings.
- Makes the plugin icon in the editor reflect the SEO and Readability score.
- Improves keyphrase counting in Indonesian by not counting ‘-‘ as a word boundary.
- Improves the feedback text for the keyphrase in title assessment to make clear that an exact keyphrase match is necessary.
- Improves the recognition of keywords in the slug if they contain a hyphen (for example: re-duplicated, on-the-go).
- Improves the transition words analysis for Russian.
- Noindexes the xmlrpc.php file and all possible ways to request it, removing them from Google’s search results.
- For privacy reasons, no longer shows whether an email address is already subscribed to the newsletter.
Bugfixes:
- Fixes a bug where the comment count would be output for Articles that did not accept comments. Props to gr8shivam.
- Fixes a bug where the social previews did not reflect the og:image tag correctly in situations where the first image in the content was used as a fallback.
- Fixes a bug where slashes in titles and open graph titles were removed before they were used as a replacement variable. Props to Jon Christopher.
- Fixes a bug where a get_plugins() undefined error would be thrown if there was already a plugin.php loaded via the init hook by another plugin. Props to Krishna Kant.
- Fixes a bug where there was no border on the bottom of metabox tabs without any collapsible sections.
- Fixes a bug where “array_merge(): Argument #1 is not an array” issues could appear under specific circumstances. Props to chteuchteu.
Other:
- Removes functions, class variables and classes that were deprecated prior to version 11.5.
- Adds a quick cache, which caches the result for 1 minute, so we don’t do the same call the my.yoast.com twice on a pageload.
- Introduces the –skip-confirmation argument to run our wp-cli reindex command without confirmation prompt.
- Yoast SEO had many scripts that relied on many localized objects. In an effort to improve maintainability we have combined all those objects into one: wpseoScriptData. wpseoPostScraperL10n and wpseoTermScraperL10n remain available for backward compatibility. Plugins that tap into our objects will need to update their code.
Earlier versions
For the changelog of earlier versions, please refer to the changelog on yoast.com.