Yoast SEO

Description

Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimised WordPress site using the Yoast SEO plugin.

YOAST SEO: THE #1 WORDPRESS SEO PLUGIN

Since 2008, Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines.

Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone. Our plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.

Yoast SEO Free contains everything that you need to manage your SEO, and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin and its extensions unlock even more tools and functionality.

HANDING YOU THE COMPETITIVE EDGE

SEO is the most consistent and cost-effective website traffic source, but it can be a challenging and complex maze. Whether you’re just starting out, or an advanced user you don’t have to do this alone. We’re here to help!

You haven’t time to learn and keep up with SEO best practices? You aren’t alone. Keeping Yoast SEO up-to-date with the latest version means you automatically receive all of the ‘under the hood’ updates to schema markup and technical SEO fundamentals. We also guide you through optimising your on-site content with our signature traffic lights approach.

Empower search engines to fully understand your website using our Schema.org structured data integration.

Yoast SEO offers comprehensive analysis tools that help elevate your content’s SEO and readability. Get powerful insights and actionable recommendations to craft helpful content that resonates with readers and search engines.

Premium Yoast AI features Get suggestions for your titles and descriptions at the click of a button. The Yoast AI features save you time and optimise for higher click-through-rates.

  • Yoast AI Generate enables users to generate meta descriptions and titles for your pages, blog posts and social posts. Great! Even better, when you also have Yoast WooCommerce SEO, you can receive suggestions for product SEO titles and descriptions too! The best part, if you don’t like the 5 suggestions, you can generate five more at a click.
  • Yoast AI Optimise helps you optimize existing content for search engines. Optimise three of the assessments in the Yoast SEO Analysis; Keyphrase in introduction, Keyphrase distribution and Keyphrase density, with easy dismiss or apply options.

QUICK AND EASY SETUP TO GET YOU STARTED

Setting up Yoast SEO is smooth, hassle-free, and doesn’t require any advanced knowledge! Our step-by-step configuration walks you through the essentials, helping you get up and running quickly.

You’ll be prompted to fill in details about your site during the setup. This enables Yoast SEO to translate all this information into structured data, which helps search engines better understand your content and website!

Are you already using another SEO plugin? Transitioning from other plugins to Yoast SEO is a breeze. We’ve designed it to be seamless, ensuring you don’t lose critical data.

Our export and import option makes it a breeze to take the SEO settings from one Yoast SEO-optimised website to another.

TAKING CARE OF YOUR TECHNICAL SEO NEEDS

Although technical optimisation is a big part of SEO, it’s not easy. We understand that only some people who work on SEO are experts or have the time to dive into the technical aspects of a website. That’s why Yoast SEO handles much of the technical optimisation, freeing up your time to work on other parts of your website, like writing helpful content.

  • Get automated technical SEO improvements, like optimised meta tags, right out of the box.

  • Add canonical URLs to tell search engines which content they should show when you have pages with similar content.

  • Get advanced XML sitemaps, making it effortless for search engines to understand your site structure and index your web pages effectively.

  • Get best-in-class Schema.org structured data integration, significantly increasing your chances of getting visually rich search results that attract more users.

  • Take complete control over your site’s breadcrumbs, allowing visitors and search engines to navigate your website seamlessly.

  • Significantly improves your website’s loading times, courtesy of our innovative data management techniques tailored for WordPress.

  • [Advanced] Yoast SEO comes with crawl settings that optimise how search engines crawl your site and reduce its carbon footprint. This lowers your site’s environmental impact and contributes to a sustainable web.

WRITE AWESOME CONTENT THAT USERS AND SEARCH ENGINES LOVE

Unlock the full potential of your content with Yoast SEO’s state-of-the-art content analysis. Crafting compelling content becomes easier with features designed to help you increase your website’s performance.

  • Leverage detailed SEO analysis that guides you towards creating SEO-friendly content, allowing you to target the right keywords and boost your visibility in search results.

  • Drive engagement and enhance readability with the integrated readability analysis. Ensure your content is clear, concise, and effortlessly readable by humans and search engines alike.

  • Preview your content as it appears in SERPs, even on mobile devices. This helps you to fine tune your meta titles and descriptions to maximise click-through rates.

  • Enable your HowTo content to be displayed in search results by using the innovative Schema structured data blocks for the WordPress block editor

  • A dedicated breadcrumbs block ensures your users always know their location within your website.

  • Embrace inclusivity in your content creation process with the inclusive language analysis. This optional feature analyses your text and provides suggestions to make your content more considerate of different audiences. By using inclusive language, you’ll ensure your content resonates with diverse groups of people.

  • Keyword research within the plugin with the Semrush integration. Find out what related keywords people are searching for, so you can optimise your content to reach more audiences.

  • Track your rankings in Yoast SEO with the Wincher integration. Yoast SEO and Wincher show how your content and keywords rank in Google.

  • Are you using Elementor to build your website? No worries, because Yoast SEO integrates with Elementor. Take advantage of all Yoast SEO’s benefits within your favourite website builder!

  • Advanced AI features in Yoast SEO Premium, write titles and meta descriptions at a click of a button and receive suggested edits to your content to take it over the ‘SEO’ finish line.

KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE

Whether you are an entrepreneur, blogger, or content creator, a developer or a business owner, Yoast SEO helps you keep your website in perfect shape by:

  • Fine-tuning the engine of your website, so you can work on creating great content! With Yoast SEO, technical optimisation becomes effortless, allowing you to prioritise what truly matters.

  • Structure your website’s content easily using Yoast SEO’s cornerstone content features, enabling search engines to understand and index your most important pages effectively.

  • Translate valuable content into structured data, allowing search engines to fully comprehend your website’s meaning and context.

  • Yoast SEO includes a powerful front-end SEO inspector that lets you preview and fine tune the SEO settings directly on your front end. With this intuitive tool, you can easily optimise elements such as meta titles, meta descriptions, URL slugs, robots meta tags, and structured data, by seeing their appearance in real time.

Helping you manage your team: with our SEO roles, you can give colleagues access to specific sections of the Yoast SEO plugin.

  • Yoast SEO has a regular two-week update cycle, ensuring you always stay up to date with the latest development and updates from search engines.

POWERFUL INTEGRATION WITH OTHER TOOLS

Yoast SEO seamlessly integrates with various themes, plugins, and tools to enhance the user experience and improve your WordPress SEO workflow.

  • Utilise the full potential of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin when combined with the ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin, and reap the benefits of Yoast SEO’s powerful analysis.

  • Seamlessly integrate Yoast SEO with the Elementor website builder, empowering you to optimise your stunning designs effectively.

  • Elevate your site search quality with Algolia integration, ensuring users can effortlessly find the content they want.

  • Combine Yoast SEO with Semrush, a leading online marketing tool. Access comprehensive keyword data directly within Yoast SEO, empowering you to supercharge your SEO strategy with data-driven insights.

  • Connect your Yoast SEO plugin with Wincher, a powerful SEO tracking tool. Monitor your keyword rankings, and track your website’s visibility in search results.

TRUST THE EXPERTS

Yoast is powered by expert developers, testers, software architects, and SEO consultants. They work constantly to stay at the cutting edge of WordPress SEO and to improve the plugin with every release.

WE ARE THERE FOR THE LONG RUN

We’re here to help you succeed with your SEO goals, because empowering our users is at the core of our philosophy!

If you’re looking for a structured learning path, our Yoast SEO academy offers free and paid online courses. Any of our paid plans provides access to all the courses at no extra charge. We also have a treasure trove of information in our SEO blog, regular newsletter and webinars to keep you up-to-date with all the latest industry news.

THE PREMIUM ADVANTAGE

Not only do you get many additional benefits by upgrading to Yoast SEO Premium, but you’ll also get 24/7 personalised support that takes away your worry.

  • Unlock our AI features; Yoast AI Optimise and Yoast AI Generate. Perfect for marketing professionals, freelance writers, and content strategists, Yoast AI features enable customers of all technical levels to apply SEO best practice to their content at the click of a button.

  • Optimise for up to five keyword synonyms by adding variants. Add up to four related synonyms of your keyword to expand your possibilities. You get the full SEO analysis for each.

  • Optimises your articles for different word forms, singular and plural variations, different verb forms, synonyms, and related keyphrases, thanks to the semantic understanding technology in Yoast SEO Premium.

  • Seamlessly handle URL changes or page deletions with our redirect manager. Automatically create redirects to prevent “404: page not found” errors and retain valuable traffic and backlinks.

  • Get internal linking suggestions in real time. The WordPress SEO plugin enhances your article’s depth and authority by recommending related posts to which to link.

  • Gain precise control over your page’s appearance on social networks like Facebook and X with social media previews. Customise your social presence and entice users to engage with your content effectively.

  • Simplify your SEO workflows and get guidance to work on time-consuming SEO tasks, like finding unlinked content, with the Yoast SEO workouts.

  • Get actionable feedback on using inclusive vocabulary to enhance your writing and make it accessible to a broader audience. (Note: this feature is currently available in English and beta).

  • Take advantage of the IndexNow integration, which instantly pings search engines like Microsoft Bing every time you publish or update content to ensure timely indexing.

  • Easily create optimised SEO titles and meta descriptions at the touch of a button, thanks to generative AI. Crafting optimised and engaging SEO titles and meta descriptions has never been faster and easier.

  • Avoid your content being used to train AI bots: Effortlessly safeguard your intellectual property, uphold data privacy, and maintain control over content by blocking AI bots from scraping it. These AI web crawlers include OpenAI’s GPTBot, Common Crawl’s CCBot and Google-Extended, used to train Google Gemini.

EXTEND YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Take your WordPress SEO to new heights with these powerful Yoast SEO add-ons:

  • Yoast Local SEO: optimise your website for a local audience, drive foot traffic to your stores, and establish a strong presence in local SERPs.

  • Yoast Video SEO: improves the performance of videos and ensures that Google fully understands its content. This helps you rank your videos higher in video search results.

  • Yoast News SEO: Amplify your visibility and performance in Google News, allowing your news website to reach a broader audience.

  • Yoast WooCommerce SEO: Enhance your eCommerce store’s discoverability with extra tools designed specifically for online stores, helping you drive more targeted traffic and dominate the search results for your products. It has generative AI tools to help you write great titles and meta descriptions for your products! Also, use WooCommerce SEO to easily import and export global identifiers like GTIN8, UPC, and ISBN for your products.

BUG REPORTS

Found a bug in Yoast SEO? We welcome your bug reports! Please report bugs in the WordPress SEO repository on GitHub. Note that GitHub is not a support forum, but an efficient platform for addressing and resolving issues efficiently.

THERE’S MORE TO LEARN ABOUT SEO

For a comprehensive resource on search engine optimisation and Yoast SEO, please explore our website, which is rich with insights and inspiration. Seek guidance in our extensively curated help centre, designed to help you provide the knowledge to optimise your website effectively.

Take your SEO skills to new heights with “WordPress SEO –The Definitive Guide” by Yoast – a must-read for WordPress SEO enthusiasts. Discover more exceptional plugins and solutions by Team Yoast, tailored to enhance your digital presence and achieve unparalleled success.

Screenshots

  • The modern interface makes Yoast SEO easy to work with.
  • Easily manage how your posts and pages appear in SERPs.
  • Yoast SEO Premium has extra crawl optimisation options.
  • Yoast SEO integrates with tools like Semrush and Wincher.
  • The famous SEO and readability analyses in Yoast SEO.
  • See what your post looks like in Google.
  • The First-time configuration helps you get started quickly.
  • The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO.

Blocks

This plugin provides 2 blocks.

  • Yoast How-to Create a How-to guide in an SEO-friendly way. You can only use one How-to block per post.
  • Yoast FAQ List your Frequently Asked Questions in an SEO-friendly way.

Installation

Starting with Yoast SEO consists of just two steps: installing and setting up the plugin. Yoast SEO is designed to work with your site’s specific needs, so don’t forget to go through the Yoast SEO first-time configuration as explained in the ‘after activation’ step! For the most up-to-date guidance on how to install Yoast SEO products, please visit our help center.

FAQ

How do the XML Sitemaps in the Yoast SEO plugin work?

Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial for SEO, as Google can retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of a site isn’t flawless.
The sitemap index and individual sitemaps are updated automatically as you add or remove content and will include the post types you want search engines to index. Post Types marked as noindex will not appear in the sitemap. Learn more about XML Sitemaps.

How can I add my website to Google Search Console?

It is straightforward to add your website to Google Search Console.
1. Create a Google Search Console account and log into your account.
2. Click ‘Add a property’ under the search drop-down.
3. Enter your website URL in the box and click ‘Continue’.
4. Click the arrow next to ‘HTML tag’ to expand the option.
5. Copy the meta tag.
6. Log into your WordPress website.
7. Click on ‘SEO’ in the dashboard.
8. Click on ‘General’.
9. Click on the ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab.
10. Paste the code in the Google field and click ‘Save Changes’.
11. Go back to Google Search Console and click ‘Verify’.

If you want more detailed steps, please visit our article in our help centre.

How do I implement Yoast SEO breadcrumbs?

The steps below are a temporary solution, as manual edits made to theme files may be overwritten with future theme updates. Please contact the theme developer for a permanent solution. We’ve written an article about the importance of breadcrumbs for SEO.

To implement the breadcrumbs function in Yoast SEO, you will have to edit your theme. We recommend that prior to any editing of the theme files, a backup is taken. Your host provider can help you take a backup.
Copy the following code into your theme where you want the breadcrumbs to be. If you are not sure, you will need to experiment with placement:

<?php
if ( function_exists( 'yoast_breadcrumb' ) ) {
    yoast_breadcrumb( '<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>' );
}
?>

Common places where you could place your breadcrumbs are inside your single.php and/or page.php file just above the page’s title. Another option that makes it really easy in some themes is by just pasting the code in header.php at the very end.

In most non-WooTheme themes, this code snippet should not be added to your functions.php file.
Alternatively, you can manually add the breadcrumb shortcode to individual posts or pages: [wpseo_breadcrumb]

If you need more details or a step by step guide, read our Implementation guide for Yoast SEO breadcrumbs.

How do I noindex URLs?

Yoast SEO provides multiple options for setting a URL or group of URLs to noindex. Read more about how to do this in this guide.

Google shows the wrong description, how do I fix this?

If you’ve crafted nice meta descriptions for your blog posts, nothing is more annoying than Google showing another description for your site completely in the search result snippet.

Possible causes could be:
1. Wrong description in code
2. Google cache is outdated
3. Search term manipulation
4. Google ignored the meta description

You can read more here on how to solve the issue with the wrong description.

How often is Yoast SEO updated?

Yoast SEO is updated every two weeks. If you want to know why, please read this post on why we release every two weeks!

How do I get support?

As our free plugin is used by millions of people worldwide, we cannot offer you all one-on-one support. If you have trouble with the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin, you can get help in the support forums here at wordpress.org or by checking out our help centre at yoast.com/help/.

The plugins you buy at Yoast are called ‘premium plugins’ (even if Premium isn’t in its name) and include a complete year of free updates and premium support. This means you can contact our support team if you have any questions about that plugin.

Read more on how to get support

What happens to my data if I enable usage tracking?

This page on yoast.com explains what data we collect to improve Yoast SEO. We only collect data when you explicitly opt in. Read more about how we handle your data in our Privacy Policy.

I have a different question than listed here

Your question has most likely been answered in our help centre: yoast.com/help/.

Reviews

I use Yoast SEO on most of my websites, and it consistently delivers great results. It’s a very complete and functional tool that simplifies on-page SEO and helps ensure my content is optimized for search engines. While it’s an excellent plugin overall, there’s always room for improvement. Highly recommended for anyone looking to enhance their site’s visibility!
3 December 2024 1 reply
the Yoast SEO plugin has helped you with your blog and that the features and settings have helped you index your website quickly and optimize the overall SEO. Thanks for the recommendation
29 November 2024
They started out with great presales support – once we committed to their tool and made the purchase that is when they destroyed us. Tool works great as long as you have let than 50 items in your store and/or are building up a product base over a year. Neither which is financially reasonable it you want to stay in business but guess that is not important since they have their money. Nice tool of you want to waste money or have a much of people on your team that do not need the tool otherwise “Buyer be ware”. UPDATED: OK good news there is a way around – DO NOT use their AI… it is not as good anyways but their tool does give you the information to use your favorite AI co-pilot. I am using ChatGPT and abandon their AI integration. I took the issues their tool did a GREAT JOB reporting and asked ChatGPT to remember to follow these rules (I am on a paid version of AI FYI)… It is MUCH faster and provides better results. Not sure if I could have done this without wasting the money on Yoast Premium but it makes a much better use of the tool so I am upgrading my rating….
19 November 2024
At this point I’m calling Yoast a SCAM and do not recommend anyone use it. I am in the process of moving away from Yoast because of it’s terribly slow performance and tanking every other plugin or feature. It makes Site Kit crash, and blocks Redirect plugin (free); probably because it is trying to charge premium $8 per month for the same service. SCAM. Burn in a hellfire Yoast.
Read all 27,746 reviews

Contributors and Developers

“Yoast SEO” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Yoast SEO” has been translated into 55 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Yoast SEO” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Change Log

24.0

Release date: 2024-12-03

Yoast SEO 24.0 brings more enhancements and bugfixes. Find more information about our software releases and updates here.

Enhancements

  • Allows to set OpenGraph image HTML metadata width, height, and type to null in order not to show them. Props to GiovanniMounir.
  • Improves the transition words assessment for Portuguese and English by updating the relevant lists of transition words. Props to BrunoAseff.
  • Introduces an error message in the Yoast General page in case of JavaScript errors.
  • Updates the design and translations of the country selector in the modal for related keyphrase suggestions.

Bugfixes

  • Fixes a bug where the first step in the First time configuration would not be considered finished unless the Site representation step would be finished as well.
  • Fixes a bug where the settings for a post type are inaccessible when the permalink structure includes special characters that require encoding, e.g., when WooCommerce products are set to use the \”Shop base with category\” permalink structure.
  • Fixes a bug where the Yoast General page would not reflect the active menu item properly if using a fallback.

Other

  • Improves the documentation for wpseo_enable_tracking filter. Props to kkmuffme.

23.9

Release date: 2024-11-19

Yoast SEO 23.9 brings enhancements to the Yoast SEO Semrush integration and various bug fixes. Find more about Yoast SEO 23.9 in our release post!

Enhancements

  • Adds a maximum width to the problems and notifications sections on the General page.
  • Adds Intent and Difficulty to the metrics shown in the Semrush integration.
  • Improves the compatibility of the Yoast blocks with WordPress 6.7.

Bugfixes

  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error is triggered in PHP 8.x when a user’s additional contact methods have been improperly set to null. Props to PhilETaylor.
  • Fixes a bug where the First time configuration would have a double separator for the title and content.
  • Fixes a bug where the First time configuration would not resize properly on smaller width screens.

Other

  • Stops PHP notices on WordPress 6.7 about _load_textdomain_just_in_time loading incorrectly.

Earlier versions

For the change log of earlier versions, please refer to the change log on yoast.com.