Getting our SEO plugin up and running should be quick and stress-free. That is why we are introducing a simpler installation flow that takes just a few clicks. If you have ever felt confused about installing plugins, this new option is here to help you.
Click the install button and follow the on-screen prompts
Complete the setup, and you are all set
Because everything is more user-friendly, you will save time and avoid the usual guesswork. This improved flow is perfect for new users and anyone who does not feel comfortable around zip files or manual uploads.
Installation should be the easiest part of your SEO journey. Try it today by heading to the Yoast SEO Free page and trying the plugin. You will be optimizing your site in no time.
Get Yoast SEO today and join the 13+million websites using Yoast.
When I first started working in marketing, Yoast SEO was the first plugin I used. Today, I work with the tool that I depended on the most. I’m Carl Henry, my background is in SaaS growth marketing with a focus on content. I like basketball, padel, painting, and gaming.
With the new Yoast SEO Dashboard, you can see how your site is doing at a glance. Instead of hunting through pages, you’ll find all your key metrics in one place. It’s easy to spot which posts need attention, see where you can improve, and figure out what to tackle first so you can spend more time refining your content and less time searching for data.
We know it can be challenging to improve your content when you have to dig through every post and page. That’s why we created a dashboard that instantly shows your site SEO Perfomance. It streamlines the process so you can focus on what matters: making your content shine.
What you get from the Yoast SEO Dashboard:
Top-level overview of your SEO: see critical insights at a glance without hunting through individual pages
Filterable views of SEO and readability scores: quickly spot where you can make the most significant improvements
Designed for clarity and direction, our dashboard makes it easy to check in, prioritize your next steps, and enhance your content strategy immediately. It’s straightforward, efficient, and all about helping you work smarter.
How to access the Yoast SEO Dashboard:
To access the Yoast SEO Dashboard, you just need to:
Ensure your Yoast SEO is up-to-date: In your WordPress admin area, go to “Plugins” and update Yoast SEO to the latest version
Navigate to the Dashboard: Click on “Yoast SEO” in your WordPress sidebar to land on the dashboard, or click on “Dashboard”
Explore your insights: Review the overview, filter your scores, and start working through your task list
Ready to see how much simpler managing your SEO can be? Get Yoast SEO today and let your new dashboard guide you toward better performance.
Carl Henry Addoumieh
When I first started working in marketing, Yoast SEO was the first plugin I used. Today, I work with the tool that I depended on the most. I’m Carl Henry, my background is in SaaS growth marketing with a focus on content. I like basketball, padel, painting, and gaming.
Take your content strategy to the next level with expanded Semrush insights in the Yoast SEO plugin! Simplify your SEO process and focus on what matters the most: crafting and optimizing content that resonates and ranks. The Yoast Semrush integration means all Yoast SEO users can access keyword intent, and keyword difficulty and track and analyze up to four keywords. All powered by Semrush—seamlessly integrated into Yoast’s focus keyphrase section.
Keyword difficulty and intent:
Make your keyword choices smarter with data-driven insights:
Keyword difficulty shows how challenging it is to rank for a specific keyword, helping you focus on keywords that are within reach and maximize your chances of ranking.
Keyword intent, or search intent, reveals whether users searching for a keyword are looking for information, products, or services. This gives you the context to create content that genuinely connects with their needs.
These insights empower you to shape content that ranks and resonates—right from Yoast SEO’s analysis section.
Terms can sometimes be overwhelming, so the Yoast team prepared a comprehensive glossary with all the SEO terms you need to build and implement an SEO strategy successfully.
Get started
Click “Get related keyphrases” below the focus keyphrase box to get started. If you haven’t activated your Yoast Semrush integrations, you will be redirected to the Semrush login page. Afterward, you will instantly see keyword insights in the related keyphrases section. This makes adapting your content strategy seamless, allowing you to make quick, data-driven adjustments as you write.
Get started in simple steps:
Click “Get related keyphrases” below the focus keyphrase box.
If you haven’t activated your Yoast Semrush integrations, you will be redirected to the Semrush login page.
You will instantly see keyword insights in the related keyphrases section.
This makes adapting your content strategy seamless, allowing you to make quick, data-driven adjustments as you write. To learn more about activating your integrations within Yoast SEO, visit our help center.
About Yoast Semrush integration
Expanded Semrush insights are available at no additional cost to all users with a Semrush account. Just update your plugin and enjoy the data you need to rank higher, right next to your keywords—effortless, real-time SEO insights, all within Yoast!
Integrate your Semrush account into your Yoast SEO and boost your ranking with valuable data within the plugin. Directly bringing comprehensive keyword research tools to your fingertips without switching platforms. Learn more about the Yoast Semrush integration.
Today we’re welcoming Yoast AI Optimize to our family of AI features. The AI features are designed to make SEO tasks easier than ever by harnessing the power of AI. The tool is perfect for marketing professionals, freelance writers, and content strategists. This brand new feature ensures your carefully-crafted content is search engine friendly.
What does Yoast AI Optimize do?
You have finished drafting your copy, and you are relatively happy with the results. Great! Until you realize that there’s a lot of manual tweaking needed to implement the suggestions in the Yoast SEO analysis. We get it, reworking copy is not the most interesting part of blogging. In fact, internal research informed us that optimizing content for SEO is the most tedious and challenging part of the content creation process. At the same time, our customers know how important this final stage can be to gaining visibility in the SERPS. So we found a solution. This is where Yoast AI Optimize steps in to help your content over the ‘SEO’ finish line.
How you can access the new feature
Easily recognizable by the color fade and signature sparkle icon, Yoast AI Optimize is automatically available to all our Yoast SEO Premium customers. To access, customers must have updated to the most recent version, 23.2 and granted consent to use AI.
Where you can use Yoast AI Optimize
Currently you can optimize three of the assessments in the Yoast SEO Analysis; Keyphrase in introduction, Keyphrase distribution and Keyphrase density. Just click on the sparkly icon next to the assessment to receive the AI-powered suggestions.
Pricing and usage
You can look out from behind your fingers, there are no additional or hidden costs! That said, we know you will all understand that to continue offering sustainable innovation using AI, we must consider fair ways to maintain our current pricing. For this reason, we have introduced the spark counter which keeps track of how many interactions you have with our AI features.
At the moment there is no limit on the number of sparks you can generate. Currently, the counter is set to 100, but you may surpass this limit without issue for now. Of course, the general Yoast AI rate limits apply. The counter resets on the first day of every calendar month. Our internal research on usage tells us that this number will not pose a challenge for the vast majority of our customers, allowing for flexible and uninhibited use across all our AI features.
What are sparks and how do they work?
A spark is defined as a single click on a button of one of Yoast SEO’s AI features. In practice, this means that when you click ‘Use AI’ to generate five example meta descriptions, this would be considered one spark. Should you regenerate another five, this would be another single spark.
You can find the spark counter at the top of the dismiss or apply modals which pop up whenever you interact with the feature within the Yoast SEO analysis sidebar.
The new signature colors help you know when you interact with AI
Kai van Grunsven, UX Designer at Yoast, comments on how the UX team created awareness around when our customers interact with artificial intelligence in line with our core ethical values. The spark counter applies to all Yoast’s AI features. Naturally, this is also fully responsive on mobile.
“As a UX designer, my goal was to give our AI features distinct branding that stands out and integrates seamlessly into our UI. I used a ‘sparkles’ icon and a gradient transitioning from Yoast’s purple to indigo to enhance AI buttons and the spark counter. This familiar icon and modern color scheme help users recognize and engage with our AI features effortlessly, ensuring a visually engaging and intuitive experience for our customers.”
Limitations
Yoast AI Optimize, like all other AI features, is currently in beta. This means you may experience limitations when using the tool. For transparency, these are listed below.
Yoast AI Optimize is only available for texts up to around 1000 words. For longer texts, the button will be inactive.
Yoast AI Optimize is only available for the Block editor. It can optimize content in the following blocks: Paragraph, Heading, List, and Table block. Content from other blocks cannot be optimized.
Yoast AI Optimize currently is available for the following SEO checks: Keyphrase in Introduction, Keyphrase Density, Keyphrase Distribution. For keyphrase density, we only support the case in which the keyphrase is underused. If the keyphrase is overused, we do not provide the Yoast AI Optimize feature.
You can only accept or reject all suggestions. It is not currently possible to accept parts of a suggestion.
For longer texts, it might take up to a minute for AI Optimize to produce a result.
Provide feedback on the new beta feature
Yoast AI Optimize is currently in beta, with this in mind, we value your feedback to make it even better. Your insights and suggestions will help us refine and enhance the AI-powered title and meta description generation feature. To help shape this tool’s future and contribute to your SEO strategy’s success, please provide feedback here.
Try out Yoast AI Optimize today
Upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium to unlock the full potential of our AI features! Gain access to all our advanced tools, including the award-nominated Yoast AI Generate and the powerful Yoast AI Optimize. Streamline your processes and receive SEO-ready suggestions at a click when you upgrade to the latest version, 23.2.
Beth is the Product Marketeer at Yoast. Before joining the company, she honed her digital marketing and project management skills in various in-house and agency environments.
Yoast SEO 22.6 is out today! This release has many performance and quality-of-life fixes to improve your favorite SEO plugin. Plus, we’re asking you to update your PHP versions. Find out what’s new in this post!
Performance enhancements
We’ve upgraded the processing of user metadata in this release, leading to improved performance, especially in generating author sitemaps. Specifically, we now prevent storing non-integral user metadata, making your database leaner and smaller, especially for websites with many backend users. This also means faster, more efficient sitemap output, making your content quicker to index by search engines. It’s a behind-the-scenes enhancement with front-line benefits: better SEO visibility and quicker content discovery for all your author pages.
A better understanding of Arabic and Hebrew
Detecting your keyphrases intelligently in your content is essential to how Yoast SEO functions. We’re always looking for ways to enhance this critical process.
In Yoast SEO 22.6, we’ve improved the keyphrase detection in SEO titles for Arabic and Hebrew. For example, when the keyphrase is باندا حمراء and the SEO title starts with الباندا الحمراء, we now recognize this as an exact match and give a good result for the keyphrase in SEO title assessment. This will make it easier for you to write better content in those languages.
Update your PHP versions!
WordPress is changing the minimum requirements for PHP, and Yoast SEO is following suit. To remind users still working with soon-to-be outdated versions of PHP, we’ll notify them in the dashboard. Upgrading your PHP versions comes with many benefits — not to mention a safer, modern environment. We are dropping support for PHP < 7.4 starting November 1st, 2024, so you have time to update in your own time.
Update to Yoast SEO 22.6
That’s Yoast SEO 22.6 for you. It’s a small but able update that will make the plugin perform better and bring more stability. Don’t forget to update. And don’t forget to upgrade your PHP versions while doing it. See you at the next update!
Continuing the theme of optimization and refinements, our Yoast SEO 22.5 release includes general maintenance updates across the plugin. We also improved guidance around best practices for taxonomies and a more effortless user experience overall.
Fine-tuning for taxonomy pages
If, like us, you get a real sense of achievement every time you see one of the traffic lights in Yoast turn green, you will be delighted to hear that from this release, fewer words are required to make this happen when working on taxonomy pages.
Commonly known as category and tag pages, these play an important role in attracting people to your website. Their practical purpose is to take your content or products and group them into bitesize subsections. Though these pages rank, like any other page or post, long-form content is not considered best practice. This is especially relevant when writing the perfect content for ecommerce categories.
For this reason, we have updated the in-plugin guidance for taxonomies to provide better guidance when updating them. This is the perfect opportunity for you to go and give these pages a bit of love on your website. If you missed our Yoast SEO Premium 22.3 update, our Premium customers can now use AI to write SEO titles and meta descriptions for taxonomies.
We’ve also fine-tuned our blocks for a better editing experience. These subtle yet significant tweaks will elevate the way you format your text. This will make it easier than ever to achieve the intended look. One example of these improvements is in our heading styles. We’ve streamlined the process for a more seamless experience.
In case you missed it, we released a new Yoast Academy course!
Last week, we released our new AI for SEO course. This course is designed for busy small business owners who want to integrate the power of AI into their workflow. The course reveals how AI works and how it will impact SEO best practices. It also discusses the types of AI that are useful when crafting content strategies. All of this can then be transformed into actionable insights.
Update now to Yoast SEO 22.5
Even these smaller updates are pivotal in helping you optimize your website for more traffic. To make the most of the updates available in Yoast SEO 22.5, update to the latest version now!
Beth Parker
Beth is the Product Marketeer at Yoast. Before joining the company, she honed her digital marketing and project management skills in various in-house and agency environments.
Yoast SEO 22.3 introduces a highly-requested AI feature exclusively for our Yoast SEO Premium customers. AI-generated titles and descriptions—simply input your keyphrase for SEO-optimized suggestions. Effortlessly enhance category and tag pages, save time, and stay ahead in SEO. Yoast SEO 22.3 also includes additional refinements and fixes, enhancing the user experience from which all our customers can benefit.
Generated titles and descriptions for taxonomies for Yoast SEO Premium
Building on the enthusiastic reception of AI generated titles and meta descriptions for our customers’ content and product pages over the last year, we are taking it one step further. Yoast SEO 22.3 introduces AI-generated titles and descriptions tailored for your category and tag pages!
Just input your chosen keyphrase and you will receive SEO-optimized suggestions for you to choose from. As with our other generative AI features, you stay in control of what the end result looks like as it is easy to tweak the results to fit your requirements or generate five more at the click of a button, as shown below.
Why it matters:
At Yoast, we recognize that content creators often overlook category and tag pages amidst the hustle of new content creation and site optimization. Many times, creators build these pages and then neglect to revisit them as frequently as necessary. After all, although establishing the right site structure and taxonomy system is crucial, it may not offer the most enjoyable aspect of content creation. Now, with our AI-generated titles and descriptions, you can effortlessly enhance these pages without sacrificing your precious time and resources.
Benefits:
Save time and resources:
Cover SEO fundamentals as part of your workflow, without adding the extra effort or time.
Focus on creating new content while our AI makes the optimization of your category and tag pages a breeze.
Worry-free title and descriptions. Our suggestions will be there to guide you, even when you are tired or lacking inspiration.
Boost search engine ranking:
Seamlessly complete another task which contributes to improving your site’s SEO performance.
Stay ahead in search results by effortlessly fine-tuning your taxonomies.
Other refinements and fixes
Yoast SEO 22.3 introduces additional refinements and fixes, enhancing the user experience for all our customers. We’ve also configured the social profile settings to enable x.com websites to be added. We’ve streamlined processes and eliminated unnecessary queries, ensuring a smoother overall interaction with the plugin.
Update now to Yoast SEO 22.3
Upgrade to Yoast SEO 22.3 now to enhance your workflow and productivity. We’re eager to learn how this update contributes to your online success, and your valuable feedback could inspire future features like the one introduced today. Your journey to improved SEO starts with this update!
Beth Parker
Beth is the Product Marketeer at Yoast. Before joining the company, she honed her digital marketing and project management skills in various in-house and agency environments.
Here at Yoast, we want to ensure your carefully-crafted content is well-received by the widest possible audience. Yoast SEO 22.2 brings more enhancements to our inclusive language analysis feature. You can expect to see more accurate keyphrase recognition, to ensure your keyphrase strategy is spot on every time! Additionally, we’ve introduced fresh translation enhancements for Yoast News SEO.
Enhanced inclusive language analysis
Our commitment to inclusivity takes center stage in our Yoast SEO 22.2 update with enhancements to our inclusive language analysis feature. We understand the importance of language sensitivity in today’s diverse online landscape. So, we’ve been fine-tuning our prompts In Yoast SEO for WordPress and Yoast SEO for Shopify to further empower our customers to navigate these challenges seamlessly. When a phrase or word is identified as potentially non-inclusive, our feature steps in with constructive suggestions, offering you the opportunity to adjust your content for a wider audience. Another benefit of improved inclusivity is that it can contribute to a positive user experience, which is becoming more important to ranking highly in the SERPS.
More accurate keyphrase recognition
In Yoast SEO 22.2, we’ve focused on upgrading our keyphrase recognition prompts, resulting in a better-refined and more accurate tool for optimizing your content’s keyphrase density. You can now benefit from more contextual keyphrase matching when a phrase contains special characters such as hyphens. For instance, let’s say your keyphrase is ‘tips for training dogs,’ and your content mentions ‘dog-training tips’. We now highight the entire relevant phrase for you. This means that you can effortlessly spot and assess the full context in which you use your keyphrases. This helps you improve the overall effectiveness of your keyword strategy.
Enhancements and refinements in Yoast News SEO
This release also introduces new translation enhancements for Yoast News SEO, personalized to each user’s setup. These smaller plugin updates result in faster downloads for our users and are optimized for reduced file size, making them more server-friendly for our customers.
User experience improvements in Yoast SEO Premium
We’ve also been busy in the background focusing on our customers’ user experience. We’ve made it even easier for you to access and locate our features within the Yoast SEO Premium plugin.
Update now to Yoast SEO 22.2
Make the most of our improved inclusive language analysis and keyphrase recognition configurations by updating to Yoast SEO 22.2.
Beth Parker
Beth is the Product Marketeer at Yoast. Before joining the company, she honed her digital marketing and project management skills in various in-house and agency environments.
In our most recent update, Yoast SEO 22.1, we are pleased to announce significant enhancements in our generative AI features. This improvement allows our Yoast SEO Premium customers to benefit from more advanced AI-generated meta descriptions and titles. This also means that you, our customers, will benefit from better support for languages other than English.
Why titles and meta descriptions matter
These seemingly modest input boxes play a very important role on your website. They convey to Google, and the end user scanning the SERP results what they can expect to find on the other side. Despite your efforts in crafting meticulous titles and meta descriptions, Google may opt to substitute its version if it deems it more effective. Consequently, there’s no assurance that your carefully written content will take center stage. Our plugin, however, empowers you with the best tools to maintain control and maximize your chances of being prominently featured.
With that in mind, you might ask, “So it is important to make sure that meta descriptions and titles are as attractive as possible to the viewer and Google, right?”. The answer is yes and no. Yes, you need attractive meta titles and descriptions. However, they also have to reflect what is on the landing pages accurately, or people will be disappointed and quickly leave. This can cause your website more harm in the long run. This scenario is known as ‘clickbait,’ and no one wants their website associated with that.
What exactly has changed?
Our generative AI features, just like your mobile phone, need updates every once in a while as technology improves. As you know, AI capabilities have changed dramatically over the last year. Our customers can see the benefit of this, especially when writing content in languages other than English. For example, our generated content in Polish is returning better results, and we expect this to be the same for other languages.
To ensure our customers get the full benefit of the performance improvements, we have also fine-tuned our prompts. This helps us make the most of the enhanced prompt engineering abilities, resulting in higher-quality text generation.
How Yoast SEO Premium returns our customers’ time
Time. Here at Yoast, we recognize that our customers are constantly balancing where to put this precious commodity. You’ll appreciate a quicker way to write titles for your content pages when you’re busy wearing many hats! With Yoast SEO Premium, we take care of this task for you, or at least get you 95% of the way. Ultimately, you remain the final decider on what goes on your website; you’re still in the driver’s seat! To read more about the benefits of our AI integration, check out our extended release post from 2023.
Other improvements and fixes
We have been busy in the background, making enhancements to our search functionality on the settings page. We’ve also been continuing our efforts to improve structured data for Yoast SEO. Utilizing structured data to offer context, Yoast SEO assists search engines in understanding your site. You can read more about how you can maximize the capacity of Organization schema on our Yoast SEO 22.0 release post.
Update now to Yoast SEO 22.1
We’re committed to keeping you on top of your game with the latest technological advancements. Yoast SEO 22.1 comes with fantastic new capabilities for our generative AI features, bug fixes, and schema updates. Take advantage of all these by updating your Yoast SEO plugin today.
Beth Parker
Beth is the Product Marketeer at Yoast. Before joining the company, she honed her digital marketing and project management skills in various in-house and agency environments.
Recently, Google announced an update on how it uses business details in search. To help you make the most of that, we are happy to announce Yoast SEO 22.0, which expands support for Organization structured data. Here, you’ll find how we help Google understand everything about your company.
Expanded support for Organization schema
Yoast SEO has always been at the forefront of supporting structured data for our users — we have the most robust framework out there. We’ve also made it easy for you to make the most of it. For instance, you can add details about yourself and your site via our settings. Yoast SEO will add these details to our full-fledged graph if you do so. Today, we’re going to do even more.
Yoast SEO Premium and its Local SEO add-on offer expanded support for Organization schema, keeping your website at the forefront of (local) SEO. With this update, you can seamlessly incorporate detailed information about your organization, including its name, address, contact information, and various business identifiers. New in this release, among other things, are founding dates, number of employees, Tax/VAT IDs, ISO numbers, and more! And, of course, Yoast SEO will add all the structured data for these fields — you just have to fill them in.
You can fill in a long list of details about your organization in Yoast SEO Premium
But what is Organization schema?
Organization schema is structured data that provides search engines with detailed information about your organization. It includes essential details such as the organization’s name, address, contact information, and business identifiers. By implementing the Organization structured data, you can enhance your website’s visibility. It improves its chances of appearing in knowledge panels and other rich search results.
Google recently announced an expansion of its use of Organization structured data, so it’s vital that your site also provides as many details as possible. Check out the official announcement from Google.
Leveraging Organization schema for Local SEO
Local SEO is crucial for businesses targeting specific geographic areas. By combining the power of Organization and LocalBusiness schema with local SEO strategies, you can significantly improve your website’s visibility to local customers actively searching for your products or services. So start filling in those details!
The importance of structured data in the age of AI
Local SEO is not the only reason to use structured data. The use of artificial intelligence in search makes it essential that search engines accurately understand and interpret your website’s content. By providing context through structured data, you can help AI algorithms find and figure out the entities on your site so users get the relevant search results they need.
Stay ahead with Yoast SEO 22.0
Upgrade to Yoast SEO 22.0 and Local SEO 15.3 and use the expanded support for Organization schema. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to optimize your website for search engines further. Download Yoast SEO today and unlock the full potential of structured data!
