Yoast SEO 20.0 Update

Yoast SEO, the popular WordPress plugin, recently released version 20.0 with a completely redesigned user interface. According to Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast, “I’m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release.”

History of Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular SEO plugin coming from the Netherlands for WordPress. In 2008, Dutch Joost de Valk made the plugin so that it would be easier for website owners to improve their search engine rankings.

De Valk started working on the plugin so that he could improve the SEO on his own site. He quickly saw that WordPress needed an SEO plugin that was easy to use and decided to make it available to everyone.

Yoast SEO 1.0, the first version of the plugin, came out in November 2008 and quickly became a favorite. It was one of the first plugins to offer a wide range of SEO features, such as meta tags, sitemaps, and breadcrumbs. By the way: The name “Yoast” is a combination of the founders’ first names, Joost and his wife Marieke, with the letter “t” added to make it more unique.

Yoast SEO has been updated and made better many times over the years. Version 2.0 came out in 2010, and it added support for custom post types and made the plugin run better. When version 3.0 came out in 2012, it worked with Google Analytics and had a better user interface.

Yoast SEO was bought by the company iThemes in 2013. This gave the plugin even more time and money to be developed and supported. After that, Yoast put out several updates with new features, a redesigned user interface, and better performance.

In the last years, Yoast became more and more criticized by some WordPress users as being resource-intensive and causing slow loading times on some websites.

In 2018, RankMath developed by the team at MyThemeShop in India entered the market as a strong competitor. It is completely free to use, while most Yoast features require a paid license. It offers a wider range of features of Yoast SEO until now, while also being more user-friendly.

Rank Math offers more detailed analysis of on-page SEO, and it also includes a built-in schema markup generator, which Yoast SEO did not have. Additionally, Rank Math’s user interface is considered to be more intuitive and easy to navigate than Yoast’s. No surprise that RankMath became quite popular while Yoast was loosing ground.

Now on 24th of January 2023 YOAST released a new major Upgrade of its SEO Plugin – Version 20.0 with a complete redesign of its User Interface.

New User Interface

The new version of the plugin includes a reshuffling of the contents of the old settings and dividing them into four main sections: General, Content types, Categories and tags, and Advanced.

The General section includes site features, site basics, site representation, and site connections. Site features allow users to easily switch specific features on and off, including different analyses, IndexNow, and XML sitemaps.

Site basics include information about the site such as the name and tagline, plus force rewrite options.

Site representation contains information to help search engines better understand the site through Schema structured data, such as if the site represents a person or organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.

Site connections allow users to connect different search engine tools to their site, such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

The Content types section includes settings for each content type on the website. It allows users to determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data best describe the content.

The Categories and tags section works similarly, but for taxonomies on the website. The Advanced section includes features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium, breadcrumb options, and settings for various archives and special pages.

New Individual Settings Page

One of the most significant changes in Yoast SEO 20.0 is the new, intuitive layout of all the individual settings pages. Each setting now has a clear and concise explanation, making it easy to understand what it does and how to use it.

The new interface also includes insightful links to give users more context on optimizing their website for search engines. This makes it much more user-friendly for those who are new to SEO. Yoast also provides a guide on navigating the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0, and what moved where, they further provide several videos on YouTube to learn the new interface.

Admin menu items

Also, the old admin menu items Search Appearance and Social have been combined into the new menu item Settings. Some tabs from the admin menu item General have been moved to the new menu item Settings. Lastly, the menu items Integrations, Tools, Premium, Workouts, and Redirects haven’t been changed and are still in the same place as before.

It remains to be seen to what extent these changes will put a stop to the success of the SEO Plugin competition.

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