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.
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.
