WordPress seo optimization plugins. A great overview of the best SEO plugins for WordPress Which seo plugin to install on wordpress

Date of publication: 2016-08-26

All in One SEO Pack

So this is the first plugin. Apparently, it is the most popular among bloggers based on the fact that it has over a million installs.

In order to view the capabilities of the two plugins that we will use in this article, I recommend that you install the plugins first on a local server, study their settings more or less normally, and then transfer them to a really working site. The fact is that you can set some settings not immediately, but only after studying additional information on SEO.

In this article, I will not give you step-by-step instructions on how to set up plugins 100% correctly. Nobody will give you such accurate information, because there are different sites, different needs and different opinions. But I propose to go through the most basic settings, since their activation will allow you to slightly improve the SEO on your site.

So, the main advantage of the SEO plugin is that it adds an additional form to the page for adding posts and pages, where you can fill in the title and description - important meta tags for forming snippets in search results, as well as keyword promotion. We will talk about this later.

Well, I will not tell you how to find, install and activate the All in One Seo Pack plugin, because these tasks are very easy to solve, and we will go straight to configuring the plugin. After activating it, a new item with the name of this plugin will appear at the top of the admin panel. Select the basic settings there.

What do we see on the first screen? That's what:

First, the canonical url. This is a very useful option, I recommend enabling them. Canonical urls allow you to prevent duplicate meta tags on pagination pages on your site, for example.

The next important setting in my opinion is the use of schema.org markup. It's great that the plugin itself offers to install it. Generally in SEO circles it is believed that the presence of micro-markup improves the overall SEO-picture.

For all other settings, you can simply hover over the question mark and click for a detailed explanation. You shouldn't give any advice here, because we all have different sites. One has it on the https: // protocol, the other - on a regular http. Accordingly, everything would be different in terms of settings.

Home page settings. Here you can write a title and description for it. In previous versions of the plugin, you could also specify keywords, but now they have been removed, since they are no longer particularly needed.

Also note if your main page will be static or dynamic. That is, if you display the latest posts on it, which is usually done by default by wordpress, then of course such a page will be dynamic, and if you always have the same content on the main page, then it is a static page.

Here I recommend leaving everything as it is. If you check the second and third checkboxes, then even if you write the title with a lowercase letter, the plugin will correct it to uppercase. Basically, if you don't make such mistakes, you can turn it off.

Next, we start setting up the header formats, only one field fit into the screenshot. I also recommend leaving everything as it is here, and if you want to change something, then first read the tips to at least understand how to fill in this format correctly.

Here you must proceed from your plans. I recommend only touching the “SEO for these post types only” setting here. Posts and pages are checked by default. Thus, the form for filling in the meta tags will appear under these post types.

Many webmasters do not promote their pages in any way, only posts. Typically, pages include a sitemap, author information, contact information, etc. Naturally, there is no need to somehow optimize such pages, because it is simply not necessary. In this regard, if you wish, you can uncheck the "Pages" item if you have no pages on your site that need optimization.

The next two blocks from the plugin are related to the verification of you as a webmaster in different search engines. I usually leave them blank. The only thing, it would be quite reasonable to add your data from Google, indicate the Google Analytics counter number, if you use it on your website.

Indexing settings

For example, by checking the noindex box next to the required post type, you will prevent the texts of these posts from being indexed. The nofollow parameter does not close the text itself, but only prohibits the search robot from following links, making them closed.

Further below in the settings, you can close all kinds of pages from indexing. Here I would advise you to look for additional information on whether it is worth doing, because opinions on this issue differ. Someone says that if you close the pagination page from indexing, you can avoid duplicates, while others say that this will worsen the indexing of the site.

If you don’t know or understand anything about SEO, it’s better to leave everything unchanged for now. Then, when you already better understand how this or that setting can generally affect the site, then make the necessary changes.

Well, then there are advanced settings, I will not consider them, since then the article will turn out to be too long. Let's take a better look at what a so-called meta box or form for filling out meta tags looks like. Do not forget to save all the settings, and then click on add a new entry.

Meta box

So, at the moment, in the latest version of the plugin, this form looks like this:

Title and description fields are required. Or rather, not necessarily mandatory, but why then did you install the plugin if now you don't want to fill in the meta tags?

I will not give any recommendations on how to fill in, this is a topic for a separate conversation, the plugin itself tells you that it is optimal to compose a title of up to 60 characters, and a description of up to 160. But it is also not advisable to use a too short title and description.

Noodp and noydir are special arguments that will prevent the use of a description that the DMOZ and Yahoo directories can generate for a given page. But if your site is simply not in these directories, then there is no need to check the boxes.

Well, the last checkbox allows you to disable the meta box for this particular record altogether.

Well friends, this was a quick overview of the All in One SEo Pack plugin, its free features, because there are also paid ones. But since the plugin is from foreign developers, we just don't need a lot of things. Now let's move on to another, no less useful plugin.

Yoast SEO

Note that you must use one or the other. Either the first plugin or the second. Ok, let's move on to the features of this plugin.

Accordingly, I will not say anything about installation and activation either, we will omit this point. By the way, I noticed here that this plugin also has a lot of installations - over a million.

After its activation, the corresponding item will appear in the admin panel. Let's start with general settings. Although there is simply nothing to talk about, you can look at the tabs yourself, nothing important is configured there.

Therefore, we immediately jump to the most important point in the plugin - headers and metadata. There is nothing much to customize in the General and Home page tabs, there you can figure it out yourself.

Here is the third tab may already be of interest to us:

Here you can configure basic seo parameters for posts, pages and media files. Namely, the template for the title and description. You can disable the desired content type for indexing and disable the meta box. Next - Taxonomies.

You can also configure the same as for post types, but for headings, tags and formats.

Accordingly, the next tab is the same, only for archives. And below you can generally disable archives by author and date.

In principle, I never saw the point in archives by author, so I turned them off on my website. Of course, if several authors write to your site, then it may be necessary to leave such archives.

You can leave archives by date, or you can not. On some sites, I still see a list of archived materials, where everything is laid out by month and year. If you need this, leave it. Just why I don’t see much point, because you will still have a page on the site with all the entries, why do you need archives by date if very few people look at them?

On the last tab, you can enable the same noodp and noydir parameters, enable noindex for subpages and archives. Again, it's up to you, I've included these things on my Yoast SEO sites. Well, right there you can include an additional item in the meta box - keywords. I do not see the point in this, so I do not tick this item.

Well, on this, everything is clear with the basic settings, we go further point by point. Social networks. I don't see much sense in filling these fields with the addresses of my pages, especially since the plugin is also foreign, so you won't even be registered on most sites.

Item - XML ​​sitemap. You can include an xml-map, then you do not have to install another plugin separately for this case. In principle, there is nothing to explain at this point, everything is set up simply. I'm using a map generated by the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Additional settings

There are some useful settings here that I recommend enabling. In the first tab, you can enable breadcrumbs on your site. This is a small block with links, where the full path from the main page to the current page is always shown. Do not enable them if you already have breadcrumbs implemented by another plugin or want to make them yourself.

Also, if you think that there is no need for bread crumbs, then do not turn it on at all. The fact is that many sites already have a very simple structure. That is, there simply is a main page, there are a couple of headings, but there are no nested headings. In this case, there may not be a need for such navigation, because the user will already perfectly understand where he is.

The most interesting tab in these settings is permalinks. There are a lot of settings here, you can read what they do for yourself. I recommend that you check exactly the following items:

Remove the? Replytocom variables. If you haven't done anything with comments on your site, then you probably don't even know about the existence of such an outgrowth in their urls like replytocom. But because of it, over time, thousands of duplicate pages can appear, which can severely impact traffic from Google. I advise you to check the box and the plugin will automatically remove this branch, which by default clings to every "Reply" button on your site.

For the rest of the settings, see for yourself if you need them.

This concludes the overview of the settings, let's take a look at the plugin meta box and how it differs from the All in One SEO Pack.

Meta boxing Yoast

For an empty entry, it looks like this:

As you can see, there are significant differences. Here you can also fill in the title, description, and you can also change the url.

The checkboxes that were in the meta box of the previous plugin are not here, but here they have their own functionality. For each post, you can specify the focus keyword for which you plan to promote the post in the search. In the free version of the plugin, you can specify only one focus phrase, more is available in the premium version.

Accordingly, immediately after you specify the focal word below, you will see an analysis of the content from the point of view of optimization specifically for this key. To better demonstrate this, I will show it using the example of an article that I already wrote:

Accordingly, the article has already been written here, the title and description of the page are spelled out, and the main key phrase for which the article is planned to be promoted has been set: css positioning.

Below you can see for yourself a list of what the plugin considers unoptimized, and what, on the contrary, is good. Unfortunately, since the plugin is foreign, no one has yet made a normal translation of these recommendations, but personally I know English at a basic level, I hope you can easily figure it out here, at least with Google Translate).

What does the plugin like about our article that it considers well optimized? For example, the fact that one of the pictures has an alt attribute, which contains a key phrase. He also recognized the title as optimal - it contains from 40 to 70 characters and also contains a key. And so on.

In any case, you will hardly be able to completely get rid of the red and orange colors in the meta box, since the plugin will always dislike something. It is important to understand that his recommendations do not need to be heeded 100%, these are just general recommendations that are quite reasonable, but if you do not do something, or vice versa, do everything perfectly from the point of view of the plugin, this does not guarantee you a high position. ... First of all, I recommend correcting the red signals, and then if you carefully read the advice and see that in this case it is in place.

Well, perhaps, this is where I will end the review of these two plugins for SEO optimization of a wordpress site. More information on search engine optimization can be found in our.

WordPress is the most used blogging platform in the world. Over 20% of websites are made in WordPress. If you have such a site, then you need to optimize the articles or other content on your site for search engines such as Google, Yahoon and Bing. This will allow them to crawl and index your website.

Here you can choose and use them to give your website a stunning look. After installing the theme, you need to install the WordPress SEO plugin. Optimization is a very time consuming area, it requires a lot of knowledge, work, and experience. Fortunately, WordPress offers many search engine optimization plugins.

Here's a list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. After installing these plugins, you will notice a big change in the search engine optimization of your site.

1.YOAST WORDPRESS SEO PLUGIN - WordPress SEO Plugin

Yoast wordpress seo plugin is the best WordPress search engine optimization plugin. It can help you improve your site's search engine optimization. You can fully optimize your site with the Yoast wordpress seo plugin.

Important features of Yoast wordpress seo plugin:

• Optimizing content
• Page analysis
• Technical Search Engine Optimization
• The presence of meta tags and links
• XML sitemap
• RSS optimization
• Manupilate .htaccess and robots.txt files
• Integration into society
• Multisite Compatibility
• Functionality Import / Export

Yoast seo plugin helps you focus on your main keywords when writing an article. It does all the technical optimization to improve your content.

How to use Yoast wordpress seo plugin

This plugin is very easy to use. Below is a real screenshot of the Yoast plugin as it will be displayed in each post.

• Above, you can see a snippet of the image that shows the plugin in action.
• Keyword Tab: Place the first keyword in this tab. You will see how often the keyword is used in the post. In it, you can maintain your keyword density.
• SEO Meta Title Tab: Write your Meta Title on this page. This is one of the most important tabs for your recording. The focus keyword is only specified here. It must be less than 70 characters.
• Meta Description Tab: Write a summary of your entry that will be displayed on the Google search engine page. It usually contains less than 156 characters. You must include both primary and secondary keywords in it.

2. ALL IN ONE SEO PACK PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS

This plugin can easily optimize your WordPress blog for search engine optimization. This is the best WordPress SEO plugin after Yoast WordPress seo plugin. It has a built-in XML sitemap display system, directly displays your sitemap to Google and Bing, and improves your site's search engine optimization.

Important Features of All In One Seo Pack Plugin For WordPress:

• Google analytics support
• Support for customizing post types for SEO
• Promotion of exemplary URLs
• Automatic optimization of the site title for Google and other search engines
• Automatically generated Meta tags on the site

All in one seo pack is the best WordPress SEO plugin that will automatically optimize your site for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing.

3. SEO FRIENDLY IMAGES PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS

As everyone knows, the ALT attribute plays an important role in search engine optimization. It is one of the important components of search engine optimization, as it describes images for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing.

SEO Friendly Images Plugin For WordPress provides a feature to automatically add alt and title attributes to all your blog images. If your images lack alt or title attributes, then this plugin will add them according to your choice.

Installing and Using the SEO Friendly Images Plugin

5. SQUIRRLY SEO PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS

Squirrly seo plugin is a great plugin for WordPress search engine promotion. It is an exceptional tool that allows you to optimize your content as well as promote it in search engines. It is convenient for both the user and the search engines.

Squirrly seo plugin helps you create both google search engine friendly content and user friendly. This is a great SEO plugin for WordPress, making it easy for both search engine crawlers and readers of your content.

Important features of Squirrly seo plugin for WordPress:

• It gives you search engine optimization tips as you enter your content.
• Helps in optimizing articles
• Suggests the keywords your customers are looking for
• Has keyword analysis algorithms
• Provides professional editing advice
• Analyzes each article separately
• Optimizes content for readers
• Provides free images for use

This is how Squirrly seo plugin works

6. BROKEN LINK CHECKER PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS

This WordPress SEO plugin is very useful for any blog or website. It checks all posts, comments and other site content. It informs us if it finds a broken link or any missing image on the site.

The Broken link checker plugin will track your entire site and blog for broken links that go nowhere.

Important features of Broken link checker plugin for WordPress:

• Monitors links on a site page, in comments or user fields
• Finds a broken or broken link
• Notifications via control panel or by email
• Warns search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo about broken links
• Extremely customizable

This is how the Broken link checker plugin works

If you are using another WordPress SEO plugin, you can suggest your best plugin in the comments. We will examine it and add it to the list.

To promote sites on the modern Internet, you need not only write cool posts, but take care of SEO optimization. But for WP there are tools that will tell you where to fix it. In this article, we will analyze what SEO plugins for WordPress are and what they are used for.

Types of SEO optimization

To understand why we need to parse the entire list of plugins, I'll write the types of SEO (search engine optimization), and there are exactly two of them:

• Internal - implies work with the site: technical settings, linking, micro-markup, valid code, acceleration, work on content
• External - mainly working with external links, getting free or paid traffic, for example from social networks, organic search, advertising

Top Best WordPress SEO Plugins

To properly configure WordPress for search, you need to provide maximum information to search robots. I will show you the top plugins that help make the page more attractive for search.

Yoast SEO

The best Yoast SEO plugin for search engine optimization, has millions of fans. The free version has many features to help you fine-tune any element of your blog.

What Yoast can do:

• Working with metadata of all kinds of pages and taxonomies provided in WordPress
• Add or change robots.txt
• Working with a server-side .htaccess file
• Improving the display of articles on social networks with OpenGraph
• XML map for search engines
• Counter inbound and outbound page links
• Basic text analysis
• Improved Title and Description
• Integration of panels from search engines, recently appeared Yandex Webmaster
• Adding
• Compatible with frameworks like WooCommerce

The basic version is enough for the normal promotion of the resource, the main thing is to set up Yoast correctly.

One of the first SEO enhancement plugins. At first it was popular, but after the update in 2012, it lost clients, because it took out many sites from the search due to an error.

AIOSP

It is a little inconvenient to use, it can do everything like Yoast, but there are several additional functions:

• Shema.org - mandatory micro-markup for promotion in runet
• Adding noffolow, noindex
• Keyword support

New plugin, the developers present many tools in the panel. There are a lot of installations, questions are asked - the creators answer and help, this suggests that there is support.

In the future, the plugin will become paid or some of its sections while it is being tested, I recommend installing it now in order to become the owner of an excellent tool, consider the features:

• Automatically creates title and description, according to the requirements of Google. We use the function carefully, because the add-on is tailored for America
• There is an Open Graph, there is the inclusion of the ability to select a media file when placing an announcement on social networks
• Attaches canonical to media pages
• Does not allow indexing of empty or empty categories or records

Conclusion which is better to use a seo plugin

As an optimizer by comparison, YoastSEO is the best solution, it includes all modern requirements.

It has a solid number of official add-ons that the creators have taken care of to make life easier for ordinary webmasters. Other organizations try to do support for yoast, for example, make special places for outputting breadcrumbs or correct header processing.

Review of additional SEO plugins

The above WordPress plugins are not enough for normal SEO, here's an overview and additional list of must-have WordPress tools.

CherryLink

CherryLink has become a must-have plugin, creates a semi-automatic. The main focus is helping to find relevant posts to insert links to them. The module will not allow spamming with internal links - there is a convenient statistics table.

cherry link

At the moment, it does not support the new Gutenberg editor, but what prevents you from switching to the old one, setting links and switching back to the block one. Yes, it's a paid price of $ 10, but it's not a pity for such functionality.

Visitors are asking, and it is not easier to enable XML sitemap via SEO plugins. It is possible and most search engines will accept them, but not Yandex, it finds errors, it is better to put them.

XML sitemap

It creates an XML map in WordPress, it is needed for the convenience of crawling the resource by search engines. It is in this section that the robot first enters, and then goes to take the page into the index.

Became a discovery of the plugin, adds micro-markup for different types of content:

Microdata for any site

• Forums
• The shops
• Recipes
• Video
• Applications
• Services

Will be a useful acquisition for any direction. It will fully mark up the elements necessary for valid micro-markup so that the site is displayed correctly in search results. It is worth watching what he does and checking with special services.

Great plugin for code cleaning Easy Header Footer - Speedup, Security and Minify... It will clean WordPress from unnecessary connections and links, which is a very significant factor for SEO promotion. What Easy Header Footer can do:

Easy Header Footer - Speedup, Security and Minify

• Security bugs - deleting wp-generator, script versions,
• Erases external connections such as RSD, Wp json, Rest API
• Adds arbitrary code to the header and footer
• Minification of HTML, CSS
• Removes brute-force names when entering admin panel
• The rest of the functions to help keep your blog code clean.

Clearfy PRO

Clearfy Pro is a more advanced SEO plugin than its predecessor. It has an extended arsenal of tools, because our WPShop team follows trends and tries to give only the best solutions.

• The Code section contains functions to clean up unnecessary parameters and configurations
• SEO - adds last modified headers, hides external links, adds meta alt to images, adds pagination to noindex, makes correct robots
• Duplicates - removes all duplicate content that WordPress produces: archives, attachments, users, pagination, replytocom
• Protection - makes entry and hacking as difficult as possible, hides all version information.
• Advanced - transliterate headlines, disable Gutenberg, remove RSS, protect content from theft
• Redirect - configures redirects of any pages without editing
• 404 - shows all 404 errors that occur when visiting the site
• Other tools useful for SEO promotion.

Plugin to increase speed by. Speed ​​is considered to be the main parameter in SEO. Even if the content is cool and the material is useful, and the speed is low, then you will not see high positions.

Caching

Caching combines all server documents that are involved in page generation and displays them in one file, which significantly increases the resource's response.

A more aggressive plugin to ease and speed up. It compresses, merges, moves the loading of scripts to different places of the blog at the request of the owner.

Script management

Knows how to download them through CDN services, which gives speed, less loading time and a cleaner document. Also cleans HTML and CSS files from garbage.

Plugins AMP and Easy Ya.Turbo Pages are created for two search engines Google and Yandex, respectively. The essence of AMP and turbo is simple, for users entering from computers a version from your hosting will be given, for those who come from mobile devices, a page from the servers of these two search engines will appear, which is as lightweight and accelerated as possible.

Plugin for accelerated pages

Not everyone agrees with this innovation, but if there are problems with the mobile version of the blog, then choose or both plugins and the issue of optimizing for gadgets will be closed, because more than 40% of the population use such devices more.

Finding bad links

But Broken link checker will show all incorrect transitions, external, internal and give recommendations on what needs to be fixed. I also recorded a video with a review for those who like to watch.

Outcome

This article has taken apart all sorts of WordPress SEO plugins. We see that there is a solution for any problem, because WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world.

We have released a new book, “Content Marketing on Social Media: How to Get Into the Heads of Subscribers and Fall in Love with Your Brand”.

A plugin is an add-on to an application that extends the original functionality.

Plugins, in simple words, are such additions to ready-made programs that write, as needed, add some kind of separate option that is useful to users.

Plugins cannot work by themselves separately and necessarily refer to some kind of application. In this case, the main software functions independently, it implements the ability to add one or more plug-ins, update or remove them. And this will not affect the performance of the program in any way.

A familiar example is the Adobe Flash Player. This is an add-on for Internet browsers that allows you to view information created in flash formats.

Add-ins are developed for completely different areas and topics.
There are many built-in filters for graphics programs, such as image processing. A common type of add-on is to expand the list of file formats that an application can work with. We use mail services every day, there are also many functions implemented in this way, for example, spam checking.
Functional extensions for Internet-related programs and applications are in great demand. These are cms (site management systems), browsers. Below we will take a closer look at which plugins are needed for sites in the first place.

What plugins are used for

Plugins help to solve the following tasks:

Simplification of the development of the basic version of the program

Initially, you can release a small compact program with an eye to the fact that all the improvements to the functions can then be screwed on separately. This helps to optimize time and resource costs.

This saves the amount of memory on the devices of the users on which the application will be deployed and has a positive effect on the speed of work.

Likewise, being able to select the desired set of options saves workspace. Not everyone needs to have access to viewing the weather, posters, bitcoin rates and other useful information every minute.

Taking into account individual needs

The second point is about everyone's personal preferences. This means that a person can install a set of plugins for himself in accordance with his needs and tastes.

Expansion of the functionality of programs

Additional functions make the software more flexible. If you need a specific plugin, you connect it, modify it, or even write from scratch and get the desired working system. There is no need to wait for new updates, ask developers to expand functionality and sometimes wait years.

List of the most popular SEO plugins

There are huge libraries of plugins that are needed for the site: improvements to cms functions, seo promotion. Taking the most popular website and blogging engine WordPress as an example, let's look at how limitless the possibilities of SEO become.
As a rule, the basic set of what a website management system can do is modest and limited. I want to expand and supplement everything, from an elementary text editor to the ability to collect and process analytics.
Most site plugins can be connected for free. Some of them have advanced features for the money.

1. All In One SEO Pack

Popular plugin for optimization site with a lot of installations and reviews.

Allows you to make all the required settings for meta tags, set canonical URLs, set a title for a page, category, tags and other types of content on your Internet resource.
There is a paid premium version.

About the same in terms of a set of options Yoast SEO, WordPress SEO Plugin, SEOPress.

They are positioned as powerful plugins to optimize your SEO, increase traffic, boost social sharing, allow you to create HTML and XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, set up 301 redirects, and more.

Which one is better to choose? Read reviews and forums.
There is an important factor when working with add-ons - the security of your site. According to statistics, a large number of hacks are carried out precisely through third-party services. Therefore, the degree of risk and convenience is up to you to assess.

2. For those who are just starting their acquaintance with seo, there are many positive reviews about Local Search SEO Contact Page.

This is a compact application that at the initial stage solves all the basic tasks for promoting your resource, allows you to bind social media buttons and widgets, QR codes, geolocation data, and more.

3. Google XML Sitemap. For those who continue to think of a sitemap as a necessary element, there is a useful website builder plugin that generates a page in a matter of seconds. All that remains is to set the parameters, which sections to include, which URLs to exclude, etc.

4. Another useful and popular add-on is PB SEO Friendly Images. Helps to work out such an important optimization area as filling in tags and alt (alternative text) for images on the website. Thanks to this, search engines will check and take into account the graphic part of the content as much as possible.

5. For those who are serious about analytics and assessing the effectiveness of a resource, we recommend Google Analyticator. It allows you to pull data from the Analytics counter.

6. There are add-ons that allow you to optimize the speed of loading pages on the site, for example, the popular with a good rating LiteSpeed ​​Cache. Features include image optimization, setting CSS and JS loading asynchronously Asynchronously, working with CSS, JavaScript and HTML, and much more.

7. Another group of plugins helps to refine the content, in particular the texts, which will be optimized and easy to read. Indicates sections that have problems with the amount of information.
SEO Content Control, SEO SQUIRRLY ™.

8. Add-ins of the Schema type help to correctly configure the structured markup schema.org, this factor is taken into account by search engines when indexing.

Now you have an idea of ​​what plugins are and how they can make your life easier. The main thing is to determine which aspects of promotion and optimization you want to pump.

Yoast SEO - # 1 WordPress SEO Plugin

Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Are you not entirely convinced? Yoast SEO is the favorite WordPress SEO plugin of millions of users worldwide!

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

DON'T LET YOUR COMPETITORS WIN

Do you know who your competitors are in your niche? There’s a reason why they are your competitors: they do what you do. And they might even do it better right now. That does not mean you can’t win from them, but it does mean you need all the help to get on top and stay on top! Yoast SEO is here to help you out as we’ve helped millions of people worldwide with their WordPress SEO efforts.

TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects and SEO experts work daily to improve the plugin with every release. Yoast SEO offers:

• Title and description templates to maintain a consistent snippet style in search results.
• A state-of-the-art Schema implementation helps search engines make sense of your site and increases the chance on those coveted rich results.
• The most advanced XML sitemap features at the click of a button.
• Full control over your site's breadcrumbs.
• Automatically set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.
• [Premium] support for Yoast SEO Premium users.
• the ability 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 readability analysis and its SEO analysis. Yoast SEO gives you:

KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE

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

Premium support

The Yoast team aims to provide regular support for the Yoast SEO plugin on the WordPress.org forums. But please understand that we do prioritize our premium support. This one-on-one email support is available to people who bought Yoast SEO Premium.

How do I add my site 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.
1. Click ‘Add a property’ under the search drop-down.
1. Enter your website URL in the box and click ‘Continue’.
1. Click the arrow next to ‘HTML tag’ to expand the option.
1. Copy the meta tag.
1. Log in to your WordPress website.
1. Click on ‘SEO’ in the dashboard.
1. Click on 'General'.
1. Click on the ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab.
1. Paste the code in the Google field and click ‘Save Changes’.
1. Go back to Google Search Console and click ‘Verify’.

How do I install 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 https://yoa.st/3qw) 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:

`

* if * (function_exists (‘yoast_breadcrumb’)) (
yoast_breadcrumb (‘

’);
}
?>
`

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:

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

How do I set a noindex for a URL?

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 incorrect description, how can 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

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?

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 question that is not on the list

Your question is most likely answered in our knowledge base: kb.yoast.com.

Contributors and Developers

Yoast SEO is an open source project. The following contributors have contributed to the development of the plugin:

Participants

Change log

12.8.1

Release Date: January 15th, 2020

Bug fixes:

• Fixes a bug where the Yoast SEO metabox would not be shown on custom post types and taxonomies when the settings of our plugin were never saved before.
• Fixes a bug where the default titles for custom post types and taxonomies were not shown in the Search Appearance settings when the settings of our plugin were never saved before.

12.8

Welcome to another year of helping you achieve your goals with your site! Today, it's time for the first in a long line of releases planned for 2020: Yoast SEO 12.8. In this release, you’ll find a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements. Find out more about this release in our 12.8 release post!

Bug fixes:

• Fixes a bug where clicking the notification center buttons would result in an incorrect icon and a misplaced focus style for the dismiss and restore buttons.
• Fixes a bug where create and update actions would be done twice on multisite environments in combination with MultilingualPress.
• Fixes a bug where an empty page title would cause the breadcrumbs schema to set a wrong url.
• Fixes a bug where author archives for authors without post would show up in the search results, even though the "Show archives for authors without posts in search results?" option was enabled.
• Fixes a bug where the styling was missing from admin error notices in WordPress 5.3.
• Fixes a bug where the results of the images alt attribute SEO assessment in the Classic Editor were incorrect when the image did not have an alt attribute but did have a title attribute.

Improvements:

• Optimizes the options retrieval processes. Props to Alex Bouma for his testing and suggestions.
• Adds the possibility to declare an identifier when integrating with the Schema output.

• Fixes the documentation in the Schema HowTo file. Props to timvaniersel.
• Fixes the documentation in the Breadcrumbs file. Props to alfiosalanitri.
• Moves the paginated comments notice from the dashboard to WordPress ’Site Health screen.

12.7.1

Release Date: December 12th, 2019

Bug fixes:

• Fixes a bug where the metabox would be broken when a relative URL was configured as WP_CONTENT_URL. Props to FPCSJames.

12.7.0

Release Date: December 10th, 2019

Yoast SEO 12.7 is out today - signaling the last release of 2019. This release is all about cleaning up and fixing bugs. Since we have a two-week release schedule, we can quickly respond to any bug we might find. Find out more about this release in our 12.7 release post!

Bug fixes:

• Fixes a bug where sub-sitemaps were rendered for non-public custom post types. Props to @stodorovic.
• Fixes a bug where nested gallery images were not included in the image count in the sitemap. Props to @stodorovic.
• Fixes a bug where the notification center ‘dismiss’ and ‘restore’ buttons had no focus style.

• Improves security by adding output escaping.

Earlier versions

For a list of changes from earlier versions, please refer to