Innovations by Yoast

Aligning our products with the latest changes in the search engines to make your life as easy as possible is a process that requires continuous innovation. We talk regularly with Google and others to do things that are not in other plugins yet, to give your website that well deserved edge to your competitors. We dive into new (web) techniques and see how we can use these to benefit our users.

To share these innovations and our thought process, we have set up this innovations page. On this page, we will guide you through some of the things we have done or are working on. To share why we did certain things, but even more to inspire you to stay on top of your game. If we all share these things, innovations become open source as well. And we’ll all make the web better together.

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Structured data

We believe that structured data will play a huge role in the future of search. It’ll also change the wider web, and create new possibilities. Helping search engines and other systems to truly understand content unlocks incredible potential. Yoast SEO is the first WordPress plugin to construct a single, comprehensive, connected graph for your pages. It helps search engines not only to understand your content but also how it pieces together.

Word form recognition

The word form functionality brings the SEO analysis to the next level. Before, we were only able to look for exact matches of the keyphrase in the text. Now, Yoast SEO Premium can recognize all possible word-forms of the words that comprise the keyphrase. This change brought us closer to the way search engines see our users’ posts!

Keep reading: Innovations by Yoast: Word form recognition »

Indexables

An important part of what our plugin does is connecting your pages to each other. Think, for example, of our breadcrumbs, our structured data, and our internal linking features. But, how do we efficiently gather information about all linked and related pages to best optimize your page while still keeping things blazingly fast? That’s where indexables come in.

Read on: Innovations by Yoast: Indexables »

Privacy by design

At Yoast, we strongly believe in privacy by design and we go out of our way to achieve it. Our rule of thumb is to never collect data we don’t strictly need. A good example of that is that we designed our SEO and readability analyses to work fully in the browser.

Keep on reading: Innovations by Yoast: Privacy by design »

Hackathons

Every 6 weeks we have a hackathon-day. During this day, all developers work together on a specific project. We have a couple of different development teams at Yoast, but during the hackathon, we are all working together.

Agile processes

Within Yoast, we use different agile processes. Our former CTO Omar introduced Kanban not long after joining the company. And, in 2019 the first team started using Scrum to gain a better insight into delivery expectations and clarity of the tasks that need to be done. Soon, the other development teams followed suit.

Keep reading: Innovations by Yoast: Agile processes »