We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface that’s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and prepares us for a bright future! Meet your new SEO best friend With Yoast SEO, we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO wa ..read more

So you want to write more inclusively? Great! That means more people will feel welcome when they read your content, and you won’t accidentally exclude them. But if that’s not enough reason, just think how many more people will engage with your content if you involve them and make your content relatable to them! So, what does inclusive language look like? We’re here to give you some examples. Seven categories Before we dive into the inclusive language examples, it’s good to know that there are roughly seven categories to pay attention to. They are: age, appearance, race, culture and ethnicity ..read more

There are two types of search: the regular organic search results and the local ones. Whenever you search for something that might have a local intent, Google will tailor its results around that query. That part is called local search, and when you try to rank your business in the local search results, you are doing local SEO. In this ultimate guide, we’ll explain the ins and out of both and help you with your local search strategy. Table of contents What are local search and local SEO? An important distinction: organic vs. place Your number one destination: Google Business Profile Website op ..read more

Google Search Console is the best data source for tracking the traffic you are getting to video content on your website from Google search, as it provides data directly from Google about the queries actually driving traffic, and can be segmented by video search specifically. In this post, we’ll provide a quick summary of how to use Google Search Console to track video SEO. We’ll also post a link to a Looker Studio Dashboard template which you can plug your search console data directly into. Ensure your videos are indexed Before you can track performance, you first need to ensure your videos ar ..read more

Last year, we launched the inclusive language analysis to help you open up your content to a broader audience. It’s been well-received, with thousands of people already using it to help improve their content. The analysis is free for everyone, so try it if you haven’t. In Yoast SEO 19.14, we’re improving the analysis. Why the inclusive language analysis? Your SEO efforts often go hand in hand with expanding your audience. One way to achieve this is by crafting your content inclusive, which can make it more accessible to a broader range of people. The more individuals read and interact with you ..read more

You might have been hearing more and more about it in the last few years: inclusive language. But what do people mean by it exactly? Is it a new thing? And why should you think about it when writing web copy? Find the answer to all of these questions in this post. We’ll do some myth-busting too! Inclusive language First things first: What is inclusive language? Inclusive language is language that avoids terms that might exclude marginalized groups of people. Typically these are terms that perpetuate prejudice, stigma, or erasure. Inclusive language favors alternatives over these terms that are ..read more

Last week, we uncovered a problem in Gutenberg’s upcoming release that breaks the block editor’s link functionality when used in conjunction with Yoast SEO. The result is that users cannot create links using the editor. This release of the block editor will happen this week, so we’re proactively updating Yoast SEO to be sure to fix this for our users. The issue is in WordPress’s block editor The next release of the Gutenberg block editor will introduce functionality to let users remove unknown formatting in rich-text snippets. It does so by adding a new default formatting style, which breaks t ..read more

If you own a blog or a business, SEO is probably important to you. Then you also know that Google cares a lot about user experience. But there’s one aspect of user experience that’s often overlooked: inclusive language. But why should you care? Creating inclusive content is good for your users and your SEO. On the other hand, if you use language that isn’t inclusive, you can exclude people and reinforce systemic biases. Yikes, right? In short, your users definitely value inclusive language, but the big question is: Does Google care? What is inclusive language? Before we dive deeper into the to ..read more

Earlier this year, we added a new feature to our Premium plugin, the inclusive language analysis. Now we’re excited to say that we’re bringing it to Yoast SEO Free as well. Why? Because we believe that using inclusive language is essential in making the web a better place. Taking a stance We believe that inclusive language is so important that we wanted to make sure that everyone (who wants to) can use this feature. Not only does it make you less likely to exclude people and alienate them with your content, but it’s also becoming more important in SEO every day. If you want to take advantage o ..read more

No, it’s not writing about nature. It means you write in a way that flows well and sounds natural. As if you were talking to someone. Now, we’re not saying to write slang words and half-finished sentences, because that wouldn’t read very well. So, what is natural writing? Read more to find out! Write like you talk (kind of) As we mentioned before, natural writing is writing in a way that’s similar to how you talk. Except a little prettier. Words like ‘kinda’ and ‘yeah’ and ‘cuz’ aren’t generally accepted as ‘professional’ language, so if you want to write for businesses (maybe your own) you sh ..read more