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 To remind users still working with soon-to-be outdated versions of PHP, we’ll notify them in the dashboard.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.
Get ready for a smoother ride with Yoast SEO 22.4! This update packs a punch, improving performance, fixing bugs and enhancing your overall user experience. Say goodbye to pesky ‘elementor’ slugs and enjoy seamless navigation. Plus, thanks to Yoast WooCommerce SEO 16.2, our webshop customers will better control how their product variants show to shoppers online.
Improvements for Yoast SEO 22.4
Across the plugin, customers can expect to see improved performance as a whole. We’ve removed unnecessary queries and fixed bugs, enhancing the user experience. In essence, we have been doing some spring cleaning.
One particularly noticeable fix is personalized for the vast Elementor community within our user base. You might have noticed that when saving a post with Elementor for the first time, the slug would stubbornly add on the word ‘elementor’ at the start. Well, no more! We’ve put an end to that annoyance. Say goodbye to those unnecessary redirects when you update to Yoast SEO 22.4!
Schema updates for product variants
In February 2024, Google updated its guidelines on structured data specifically for product variants, a complex issue for many ecommerce sites. They aim to match customer intent to results online more effectively. If you’ve ever searched for a t-shirt in a specific color and had a different colored t-shirt pop up in the search results, you can relate to the shopper’s experience.
We’ve updated our product schema in Yoast WooCommerce SEO 16.2 to align with best practices to communicate your product attributes to search engines more effectively. This will ensure your products match potential shoppers’ search criteria as closely as possible. So, now is a great time to ensure that all your site’s product variant data is correct on your website. Check our configuration guide for Yoast WooCommerce SEO for more guidance on how to do this.
Product schema settings in WooCommerce SEO
Yoast SEO workouts to guide you through optimizing your website
In the spirit of seasonal change, now is the perfect time to complete spring cleaning on your site by completing one or more SEO workouts. For Yoast SEO Premium customers, consider these workouts your personal trainers, guiding you through optimizations in just three simple steps each, ensuring your favorite content gets seen by your customers.
Update now to Yoast SEO 22.4
We’re here to empower your digital journey with bug fixes, enhancements, and tailored solutions like our exclusive SEO workouts. Happy optimizing with Yoast SEO 22.4!
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.
Starting with SEO can be hard, but tools like Yoast SEO simplify the process. One crucial feature is our traffic light system. We’ve designed this system to guide you and your content toward SEO success. Let’s find out what these traffic lights mean for your work in Yoast SEO.
How the Yoast SEO traffic lights work
In Yoast SEO, traffic lights act as your digital traffic controllers, signaling the SEO health of your content. Picture them as your navigational aids: green for smooth sailing, orange for a cautious approach, and red for areas requiring immediate attention. These traffic lights provide a quick snapshot of how well your content aligns with SEO best practices and search engine requirements.
The philosophy of the traffic lights
While not all traffic lights have to be green, the goal is to ensure that the overall balance of green lights reflects a well-optimized piece of content. Embrace the feedback each traffic light color provides to enhance your content’s quality, relevance, and SEO-friendliness.
Aim for green traffic lights overall — not for every analysis in Yoast SEO
Green traffic light
A green traffic light signifies that your content meets the SEO criteria set by Yoast. It indicates that your content is well-optimized for search engines and has a higher chance of ranking well in search results. However, achieving a green light is not the only goal; the quality and relevance of your content are even more critical.
Orange traffic light
An orange traffic light is a warning sign, suggesting areas where your content can be further optimized. It prompts you to review and improve specific aspects of your content, such as keyword usage, readability, or meta information. While an orange light doesn’t indicate critical issues, addressing these areas can enhance your content’s SEO performance.
Red traffic light
A red traffic light demands immediate attention as it highlights critical issues that must be addressed. Ignoring red lights can negatively impact your content’s visibility and ranking potential. It signals areas of concern, such as missing meta tags, keyword stuffing, or other SEO issues that can prevent your content from performing well.
Inclusive language analysis traffic light
A recent addition to Yoast SEO is the inclusive language analysis traffic light. This focuses on using inclusive language in your content. This traffic light evaluates your content for inclusivity, sensitivity, and diversity in language use. A green light indicates that your content is inclusive and respectful. An orange or red light suggests areas for improvement in promoting diversity and inclusivity.
Understanding the nuances of Yoast SEO traffic lights helps you optimize more effectively. The feedback lets you make informed decisions to improve your content so it will reach its goals.
Responding to Yoast SEO traffic light feedback
To effectively respond to the feedback provided by Yoast SEO traffic lights, consider the following strategies:
Green traffic light feedback:
Analyze how you earned your green lights and replicate those practices in future content.
Optimize future and existing content based on the successful tactics identified through green lights.
Orange traffic light feedback:
Prioritize areas flagged by the orange lights that significantly impact how well your content performs.
Implement the recommended improvements provided by Yoast SEO to address the identified issues and enhance your content.
Red traffic light feedback
Address critical issues identified by red lights promptly to prevent SEO mistakes and improve your content’s visibility.
Follow the actionable advice given by Yoast SEO to fix the issues causing the red lights. This helps ensure that you follow SEO best practices.
Implement the strategies and respond to the feedback provided by the Yoast SEO traffic lights. Optimizing your content means improving its SEO-friendliness and boosting its visibility in search results.
You can quickly see the scores from the front-end of your site with the admin bar and front-end inspector in Yoast SEO
Don’t go chasing green traffic lights
While achieving green lights in Yoast SEO is desirable, balancing getting those lights with a holistic SEO strategy is essential. Focusing solely on obtaining green lights may lead to overlooking critical SEO elements. In addition, you might be compromising the overall quality of your content.
There are multiple pitfalls when you chase green lights:
Tunnel vision: Fixating on green lights may distract you from the broader SEO strategy and content quality.
Over-optimization: Striving for all green lights can result in keyword stuffing or unnatural content, harming your results.
Lack of user focus: Prioritizing green lights over quality and relevance can lead to content that fails to engage and convert visitors.
Getting those green lights comes with many benefits:
SEO-friendly content: Green lights indicate that your content aligns with SEO best practices, increasing its visibility and ranking potential.
User-friendly content: Well-optimized content with green lights tends to be more user-friendly and engaging, enhancing the overall user experience.
Search engine visibility: Content with green lights might have a bigger chance of being indexed. Search engines can rank it favorably, driving organic traffic to your site.
Now you understand the allure, pitfalls, and benefits of green lights in Yoast SEO. Use these insights to balance optimization and content quality. Your goal is to publish the best content out there — with some help from Yoast SEO!
Mastering the traffic lights in Yoast SEO
Interpreting and responding to Yoast SEO traffic lights is a fundamental step in your SEO journey. Use the feedback provided to improve your content’s visibility. Working with Yoast SEO gives your content a better chance of standing out from your competitors!
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!
Yoast SEO checks for the keyphrase density or keyword density of your text. But what is keyphrase density exactly? And why is it important for your SEO? In this article, we answer these questions. On top of that, we’ll discuss what you can do to improve the keyword density of your content so you score a green bullet on the plugin’s keyphrase density check. Let’s dive in!
Keyphrase density is the number of times your focus keyphrase occurs in your copy, compared to the total text of that page. So if you have a text that is 100 words and 5 of those are your focus keyphrase, your keyphrase density is 5%. We used to call it keyword density, but nowadays it’s more common to focus on a search term that consists of more than one word. That’s why we rather call it keyphrase density in Yoast SEO.
Why is it important for SEO?
Your keyphrase density is important for SEO because Google tries to match a user’s search query to the best-fitting page out there. To match your pages with a certain query, Google needs to understand what the page is about. That’s why you need to use your keyphrase, the phrase you’d like to rank for, in your copy. Luckily, this often comes naturally. If you want to rank for, for instance [bake vegan pancakes] you probably use this phrase or variations of it throughout your text.
However, if you repeat your keyphrase too often in your copy it becomes unpleasant to read. That’s something you should avoid at all times. After all, you want users to enjoy and understand your copy well. A high keyphrase density is also a signal to Google that you might be stuffing your text with keywords – also known as over-optimizing. As Google likes to show the best result to users, both in relevance and readability, this can negatively affect your rankings.
What does the keyphrase density check do?
The keyphrase density check in Yoast SEO assesses whether you’ve used the word(s) from your focus keyphrase often enough in your copy. It also checks if you didn’t go overboard and use the keyphrase too often. It’s good to know that the length of your keyphrase plays a factor in how your score is calculated. If you choose a longer phrase, it might be much more difficult to use it a certain number of times in your text, than if you’re using a shorter keyphrase. The check takes this into consideration to preserve the readability of your text.
We’ve included the length of your keyphrase as a weighting factor when calculating keyphrase density. That means that you will need to use your longer keyphrase less often in the text than your shorter keyphrase, to get a green traffic light. Not only do we tell you how many times you already used your keyphrase in the text, we also give you an idea about how many times you should use it.
An example of the keyphrase density assessment feedback in Yoast SEO
In the free version of Yoast SEO for WordPress, you’ll get a green traffic light if your keyphrase density lies between 0.5 and 3%. For a match to be counted, all words should occur in one sentence, but the order of the words may differ.
You won’t see the percentage mentioned in your feedback. Instead, we mention the exact number of times you used your keyphrase throughout your text and compare this to the number we advise. We feel that absolute numbers make it easier to work on improving your text.
Premium and Shopify: Word form recognition and related keyphrases
In certain languages, Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast SEO for Shopify recognize various word forms of your keyphrase. For instance, [train], [trained] or [training]. This means that Yoast SEO picks up on these variations and sees them as forms of your chosen keyphrase. Making it easier for you to naturally write about your topic and be less concerned about using your keyphrase often enough.
Let’s say you’d like to rank for [bake vegan pancakes]. If you write, “Here, you’ll learn how to bake the best vegan pancakes” this will be counted as an occurrence of the keyphrase. Also, if you’d write “baking a vegan pancake is easy as pie”, Yoast SEO Premium and our Shopify app recognize that as the focus keyphrase as well. That’s why the upper boundary in these tools is a bit higher: 3.5% instead of 3%.
In Premium and our Shopify app, you can also enter related keyphrases. These are words and phrases that are connected to your focus keyphrase, but not synonyms. Any related keyphrases you add have a keyphrase density check of their own. So if the density of your focus keyphrase is too high, have a look at any related keyphrases and see if those are more suitable to use instead.
Go Premium to get access to this feature!
Unlock lots of features and get access to all of our SEO courses with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin:
How to improve your keyphrase density
If your keyphrase density score is too low, that means that it’s not clear enough that your text is about that specific topic. In that case, you should use the keyphrase (or variations of it) more often. Check your copy and make sure you make clear what you’re writing about. Stay on topic! If the keyphrase density is too high, you’re using your keyphrase too often. Your text will probably come across as quite spammy, to both your website visitors and Google.
Using synonyms is a great way to avoid repetitiveness. Synonyms do not count towards your keyphrase density score, as that exclusively looks at the use of your actual focus keyphrase. If you’ve used synonyms and are worried it might be too much, here’s a tip! Have a look at the keyphrase distribution check in Yoast SEO. That highlights your focus keywords and its synonyms throughout the text. If you’ve entered synonyms that is. By looking at the highlighted phrases you can determine whether your keyphrase (in any form) is mentioned often enough throughout the text. A good check to see whether you stay on topic until the end!
Why do I have a red score on the keyphrase density check?
If you get a red traffic light for using your focus keyphrase too often or not enough and you’re not sure why, here are some things to look out for.
An example of a red feedback traffic light for the keyphrase density check
First off, make sure your full focus keyphrase is within one sentence to make sure it’s being counted.
Check your spelling. If you use [pancake] in your text, but wrote [pencake] in the focus keyphrase field, the plugin will not recognize it. Using capital letters, like in [Pancake] or even [PANCAKE] will not impact recognition though.
If your keyphrase density is too high, make better use of synonyms. Synonyms of your focus keyphrase will not count towards your total score, but they’ll probably make your text more pleasant to read.
Some page builders in WordPress conflict with our plugin. If our plugin is not able to find your content or your keyphrase due to a page builder, the results will be distorted. The fastest way to rule out conflicts is to perform a conflict check.
Some non-latin, non-ideograph based languages may not calculate accurately. Please submit a bug to notify us of that, it’s much appreciated.
I don’t get feedback on my keyphrase density. Why is that?
If you don’t get feedback on your keyphrase density, there are a couple of things you should check:
Did you enter your focus keyphrase in the focus keyphrase field? Because that’s a basic requirement for the plugin to run the check.
If you don’t enter a focus keyphrase in this field, the plugin is not able to perform all checks.
The keyphrase density check is only performed when your content consists of at least 100 words.
Sometimes our plugin conflicts with another plugin, a feature within your theme or, in rare cases, something on your server. For example, there has been a recent increase in users with a plugin or theme that provides a visual page or content builder. This may not be compatible with our page analysis.
Conclusion
Make sure you use your focus keyphrase enough throughout the whole text. But at the same time, don’t overdo it. You don’t want Google to think you’re stuffing your text with keywords. It’s doesn’t make for great user experience and will hurt your rankings.
If your keyphrase density is too low: add your focus keyphrase into your text more often. Also, check if your text stays on topic, because it should be quite easy to mention your keyphrase enough. If your score is too high, reassess your text first. See if there are places where you can replace your keyphrase with a synonym. With these tips, you should be able to score that green traffic light for keyphrase density!
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.
