seo enhancements
Yoast SEO 22.6 brings more enhancements

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 To remind users still working with soon-to-be outdated versions of PHP, we’ll notify them in the dashboard.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!

Coming up next!

seo enhancements
Yoast SEO 22.5 delivers improvements and fixes

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!

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Yoast SEO 22.3: Introducing AI for category and tag pages

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!

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Yoast SEO 22.2: Fine-tune your content for maximum impact

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. 

Coming up next!

Yoast SEO 22.1: AI update and better language support

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.

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Yoast SEO 22.0: Supporting Organization schema

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!

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Yoast SEO 21.9: Maintenance and more optimizations

As a site owner, you understand the significance of SEO in driving organic traffic and increasing visibility. Keeping your SEO efforts up to date is essential to stay ahead of the competition. The same goes for developing an SEO plugin — to keep you at the top of your game, we need to be at the top of our game. That’s why maintenance releases like Yoast SEO 21.9 are so important.

The importance of maintenance

Regular maintenance is essential to ensure optimal performance of Yoast SEO. Our latest release introduces various enhancements, optimizing the plugin for an improved user and search engine experience.

Through ongoing maintenance, we address specific bugs and issues within the plugin, enhancing its stability and reliability. Keeping your plugins updated allows you to enjoy a seamless and error-free experience.

Improvements in Yoast SEO 21.9

One of our improvements in Yoast SEO 21.9 is an enhanced sitemap rewrite rules mechanism, ensuring smoother functionality and improved performance. In addition, we’ve made significant optimizations to the update process. From now on, rewrite rules will no longer be cleared for every option update, eliminating unnecessary operations. Instead, the rewrite rules will only be cleared when changes are made to the ‘strip category base’ option.

Sitemap image filters

Yoast SEO 21.9 introduces a new option based on user feedback. With this release, we have enabled filtering images for taxonomies and the homepage in the sitemap. This user-requested option allows website owners more control over the images in their sitemap, even when using plugins to add images to taxonomies.

Previously, filtering URL images was limited to posts and pages, but we have expanded this functionality to include taxonomies and the homepage. This enhancement provides greater flexibility and empowers developers to optimize their sitemaps easily.

Smaller file size for Yoast SEO Premium

Installing our Premium SEO plugin is now a breeze. We’ve made it even easier by reducing the zip size and removing the free version from the file. Yoast SEO Premium is now around 3MB lighter. This improvement eliminates potential installation issues, ensuring a seamless experience for all.

Update to Yoast SEO 21.9

Maintenance is a crucial aspect of optimizing your website for search engines. It’s also a crucial aspect of developing Yoast SEO. By ensuring improved performance, stability, compatibility, and ongoing support, Yoast SEO helps you stay ahead. Don’t miss out on the benefits of our latest release. Update your Yoast SEO plugin today and advance your SEO efforts.

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