All our free WordPress plugins obviously have their own support forums at wordpress.org. Yoast SEO academy » Learn everything about SEO, WordPress, and our. WordPress is one of the best content management systems when it comes to SEO. But even though it gets a lot right “out of the box”, there’s much more that you can do to improve your performance.
Description
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.
GET AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION
To rank highly in search engines, you need to beat the competition. You need a better, faster, stronger website than the people who sell or do the same kinds of things as you.
Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, and has helped millions of people like you to get ahead, and to stay ahead.
TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO
Yoast SEO is packed full of features, designed to help visitors and search engines to get the most out of your website. Some of our favourites are:
- Automated technical SEO improvements, like canonical URLs and meta tags.
- Advanced XML sitemaps; making it easy for Google to understand your site structure.
- Title and meta description templating, for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
- An in-depth Schema.org integration that will increase your chance of getting rich results, by helping search engines to understand your content.
- Full control over site breadcrumbs, so that users and search engines always know where they are.
- Faster loading times for your whole website, due to an innovative way of managing data in WordPress.
- [Premium] E-mail support for our Yoast SEO Premium users.
- [Premium] The possibility to expand Yoast SEO with the News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions.
WRITE KILLER CONTENT WITH YOAST SEO
We know content is king, that’s why Yoast SEO is famous for its state-of-the-art content and SEO analysis. Yoast SEO gives you:
- SEO analysis: an invaluable tool while writing SEO-friendly content with the right (focus) keyphrases in mind.
- Readability analysis: ensures that humans and search engines can read and understand your content.
- Full language support for: English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swedish, Hebrew, Hungarian and Turkish.
- A Google preview, which shows what your listings will look like in the search results. Even on mobile devices!
- Innovative Schema blocks for the WordPress block editor, so that your FAQ and HowTo content can be shown directly in the search results. Plus a breadcrumbs block to guide your users.
- [Premium] Internal linking blocks to easily improve the structure of your content. Easily add a table of contents block, a related links block, a subpages block, or siblings block! Plus, we’ll keep adding these easy-to-add blocks to improve your site structure.
- [Premium] Social previews to show you how your content will be shown on Twitter and Facebook.
- [Premium] The Insights tool that shows you what your text focuses on. This way you can keep your article in line with your keyphrases.
- [Premium] Optimize your content for synonyms and related keyphrases.
- [Premium] Optimize your article for different word forms of your keyphrases, as the singular and plural. But also different verb forms, synonyms, and related keyphrases. This makes for more natural content!
- [Premium] Automatic internal linking suggestions: write your article and get automatic suggested posts to link to!
- [Premium] An orphaned content filter to detect posts that have no links pointing towards them!
KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE
Whether you are an online entrepreneur, blogger or content creator, a developer, a (WordPress) SEO expert or a business owner, Yoast SEO helps you keep your website in perfect shape by:
- Tuning the engine of your website, so you can work on creating great content!
- Giving you cornerstone content and internal linking features to help you optimize your site structure in a breeze.
- Translating your content to structured data where possible, to help search engines understand your website.
- Helping you manage your team: with our SEO roles you can give colleagues access to specific sections of the Yoast SEO plugin.
- [Premium] Automatically creating redirects when URLs change or when pages are deleted, and providing tools to manage or create redirects.
- [Premium] Showing you social previews to manage the way your page is shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
TRUST THE EXPERTS
Yoast is powered by a team of 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.
Yoast SEO is the only WordPress SEO plugin made by world-renowned SEO experts.
GET PREMIUM SUPPORT
The Yoast team offers regular support on the WordPress.org forums. But we hope you understand that we prioritize our Premium customers. This one-on-one email support is available to people who have purchased Yoast SEO Premium.
Did you know that Yoast SEO Premium contains a lot of extra features:
- A redirect manager that prevents “404: page not found” errors
- Optimize without worrying about over-optimization with intelligent word form recognition available in multiple languages.
- Internal linking blocks to structure your site easily.
- Internal linking suggestions while you’re writing.
- Preview your content to see what it will look like in the search results and when shared on social media using the Google preview and social preview.
- Cornerstone content checks that point search engines to your most important pages.
- Connect Yoast SEO to Zapier to easily create zaps that instantly share your published posts with 2000+ destinations like Twitter, Facebook, and much more.
If you are serious about your WordPress SEO, install the Yoast SEO Premium plugin! Costs a little, saves a lot of time!
OUR EXTENSIONS TO FURTHER IMPROVE YOUR WORDPRESS SEO
Check out these SEO add-ons by Yoast:
- Yoast Local SEO optimizes your website for a local audience.
- Yoast Video SEO ensures that Google understands what your video is about, increasing the chances of ranking in the video results.
- Yoast News SEO for news websites that want to improve their visibility and performance in Google News.
- WooCommerce SEO for all online shops that want to perform better in the search results and social media.
Wordpress Seo Meta
These extensions work fine with the free version of Yoast SEO. Of course, the premium extensions also include 24/7 support.
Oh, don’t forget: our Yoast Academy is for all entrepreneurs, bloggers, and anyone who wants to learn more about optimizing websites, improving your WordPress SEO, and if you want to take your content to the next level!
INTEGRATIONS
Yoast SEO integrates seamlessly into a range of themes and plugins. We work particularly well with:
- The WordPress block editor (or ‘Gutenberg’ editor).
- The official AMP plugin, which changes your templates to use the ‘AMP’ HTML format.
- Google’s Web Stories plugin, which helps you to create ‘web stories’.
- The Advanced Custom Fields plugin, when you also activate the ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin.
- The Elementor website builder.
- Zapier, which helps you automate your publishing flow.
BUG REPORTS
Do you want to report a bug for Yoast SEO? Best to do so in the WordPress SEO repository on GitHub. Please note that GitHub is not a support forum and issues will be closed if they don’t meet the bug requirements.
READ MORE
Want more information on search engine optimization and Yoast SEO? Have a look at:
- The Yoast SEO Plugin official homepage.
- The Yoast SEO Help center.
- WordPress SEO – The definitive Guide by Yoast.
- Other WordPress Plugins by Team Yoast.
- Also follow Yoast on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter.
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 configuration wizard as explained in the ‘after activation’ step!
INSTALL YOAST SEO FROM WITHIN WORDPRESS
- Visit the plugins page within your dashboard and select ‘Add New’;
- Search for ‘Yoast SEO’;
- Activate Yoast SEO from your Plugins page;
- Go to ‘after activation’ below.
INSTALL YOAST SEO MANUALLY
- Upload the ‘wordpress-seo’ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory;
- Activate the Yoast SEO plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress;
- Go to ‘after activation’ below.
AFTER ACTIVATION
- You should see (a notice to start) the Yoast SEO configuration wizard;
- Go through the configuration wizard and set up the plugin for your site;
- You’re done!
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 login 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 in to 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 details steps, please visit our article on our help center.
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:
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 on the support forums here at wordpress.org or by checking out our help center 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.
I have a different question than listed here
Your question has most likely been answered on our help center: yoast.com/help/.
Reviews
Topics
- Search Engine Optimization Resources
- Robots.txt Optimization
WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.
WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging. There are also a number of third party plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine optimization (SEO).
However, once you start using various WordPress Themes and customizing WordPress to meet your own needs, you may break some of those useful search engine friendly features. To maintain your WordPress site’s optimal friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, here are a few tips:
Good, Clean Code
Seo For Wordpress Website
Make sure your site’s code validates. Errors in your code may prevent a search engine from moving through the site successfully.
Content Talks
Search engines can’t “see” a site. They can only “read” a site. Looks do not talk to a search engine. What “talks” to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good “score”.
Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind
How do you find information on the Internet? If you are writing something that you want to be “found” on the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence. Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get in good favor with search engines.
Content First
A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress Themes are designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near the top.
Keywords, Links, and Titles Meet Content
Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them through a sifter, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your document are compared to words found within your links and titles. The more that match, the better your “score.”
Content in Links and Images
Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt
and title
in link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.
Link Popularity
Wordpress Seo Manager Role
It is not how good your site is, it is how good the sites are that link to you. This still holds weight with search engine favoritism. It’s about who links to you. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all built into WordPress. These help you link to other people, which gives them credit, but it also helps them link to you, connecting the “links.” The number of incoming links your site has that have been recognized by Google can be checked by typing link:www.yoursite.com
into Google (other search engines have similar functions). Other ways to generate incoming links to your site include:
- Add your site’s url to your signature on forum posts on other sites.
- Submit your site to directories (see below).
- Note: Leaving comments on blogs will not help with this, since all modern blogging tools use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Don’t be a comment spammer.
Good Navigation Links
A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.
Get the Blog Indexed in Google Search Get the Blog Indexed in Google Search
Before getting to the details on how you can get Google to recognize you, we need to first understand these three terms:
- The Googlebot: This is the software used to search that is used by Google to gather new information that has been uploaded online so that it can be fed on Google pages. Once information that you had uploaded is picked up by this software, then it can be found on Google pages.
- Crawling: This is the process where the above named software, Googlebot, roams from site to site detecting any new information to be uploaded on Google. This software works by going through new links that have been uploaded recently and which are generating a lot of traffic.
- Indexing: Once the information has been gathered by the Googlebot through the process called crawling, it is processed through another process called indexing. It is through this process that the quality of content is determined so that they can be placed appropriately on Google pages. The question now is, how exactly does Googlebot find this information? Firstly, it starts by siting the web pages that it had cited in the previous search. It then detects new pages associated with those old ones or just new ones all together. More details on the same would be found on Search Console help for those who are interested in the same. Any new information is cited with the help of sitemaps and links that lead to those articles.
Read more on How to Get Your Blog Indexed in Google Search
Search Engine Site Submissions Search Engine Site Submissions
There are many resources that will “help” you submit your site to search engines. Some are free, some for a fee. Or you can manually submit your site to search engines yourself. Whatever method you choose to use, once your site has been checked for errors and is ready to go, search engines will welcome your WordPress site.
Here are some tips for successful site submissions:
- Make sure you have content for search engines to scan. In general, have more than 10 posts on your site to give the search engines something to examine and evaluate.
- Do not submit your site to the same search engine more than once a month or longer, depending upon their criteria, not your anxiousness to be listed.
- Have ready to type, or copy and paste, the title of the site, and the categories your site may belong to in a search engine directory.
- Have a list of your website’s various “addresses/URLs” ready. You can submit your root directory as well as specific categories and feeds to search engines, expanding your search engine coverage.
- Keep a list of the various search engines and directories you submit to so you do not accidentally resubmit too soon, and you can keep track of how they include you among their pages and results.
Directory Sites
It is also useful for traffic generation and search optimization purposes to submit your site to directories. Both comprehensive directory sites and those specific to the subject or localisation of your site can be used.
Search Engine Optimization Resources Search Engine Optimization Resources
While WordPress comes ready for search engines, the following are more resources and information you may want to know about preparing and maintaining your site for search engines’ robots and crawlers.
Meta Tags Meta Tags
Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head
of your header.php
template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on Meta Tags in WordPress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.
The WordPress Custom Fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and Pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.
Robots.txt Optimization Robots.txt Optimization
Search Engines read a file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt
to get information on what they should and shouldn’t check.
Adding entries to robots.txt to help SEO is popular misconception. Google says you are welcome to use robots.txt to block parts of your site but these days prefers you don’t. Use page-level noindex tags instead, to tackle low-quality parts of your site. Since 2009, Google has been evermore vocal in its advice to avoid blocking JS & CSS files, and Google’s Search Quality Team has been evermore active in promoting a policy of transparency by webmasters, to help Google verify we’re not “cloaking” or linking to unsightly spam on blocked pages. Therefore the ideal robots file disallows nothing whatsoever, and may link to an XML Sitemap if an accurate one has been constructed (which itself is rare though!).
WordPress by default only blocks a couple of JS files but is nearly compliant with Google’s guidance here.
See also: See also:
Feed Submissions Feed Submissions
WordPress comes built-in with various feeds, allowing your site to be viewed by various feed readers. Many search engines are now accepting feed submissions, and there are many site which specialize in directories of feeds and feed services.
To submit your site’s feeds, you need to know the link to the various feeds your site provides. The article WordPress Feeds lists the various links of the feeds that come built into WordPress.
For information on customizing these links, see the article on Customizing Feeds.
Permalinks Permalinks
Permalinks are enhancements to your existing URLs which can improve search engine optimization by presenting your post, page, and archive URLs as something like <nowiki>http://example.com/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/</nowiki>
rather than <nowiki>http://example.com/index.php?p=423</nowiki>
. See Using Permalinks for more information.
As search engines use links and the title
as part of their information gathering, links to posts and articles within your site gain importance with Permalinks.
Sitemaps Sitemaps
A sitemap or “site map” is a single page listing of all the posts on your website. It is intended for your visitors to get a good overview on what your site is about and to find a blog post quickly but it also has great benefits in the search engines as a good link is always pointing to all your blog posts. By having a link to your sitemap on all your sites pages both visitors and search engines will easily get to it and find all your posts.
Here is a tutorial with three different examples of sitemaps with demos and how to set them up:
Google Sitemaps Google Sitemaps
As of June 2005, Google is now accepting sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions. Google needs to have this sitemap formatted in a special way using XML. You can find more information about Google’s Sitemap Submissions from Google, and the discussion on the WordPress Forum about WordPress and Google Site maps.
Some utilities have been created to help the WordPress user to create a Google site map of their site for submission to Google. For more information on these and Google sitemaps:
Link Relationships Link Relationships
There is some debate over whether listing the link relations actually effect search engine ranking however it is simple to implement.
More Resources and Tutorials More Resources and Tutorials
There is a lot to learn about search engine optimization and site submission. Here are just a few sites to help you learn more about how this works:
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