WordPress SEO by Yoast, version 1.0

Yay!!! It’s there. After almost a year of coding, I dare say that my WordPress SEO plugin is finally to be called stable. That doesn’t mean there are no more bugs left to squash: I wish. It does mean though that I now strongly believe that it’s safe to run on smaller and bigger sites alike. Some very big sites are already running it.

Mashable has been running WordPress SEO for quite a while now and so have my friends over at The Next Web. Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, one of the founders and owners of The Next Web, recently said the following about my plugin:

“The SEO plugin by Yoast helps all our editors add SEO juice to their post fast & easy. Editors should focus on writing content, not gaming results. But they are the ones most suitable to write descriptions and titles for their own stories. The plug-in allows them to do just that without needing an SEO expert to walk them through the process. An invaluable tool for any professional blog.”

I think Boris got exactly what my aim is with this plugin. I don’t want to bore you with all the details, I want you to write better content and aid you with that. The help from Linkdex and the Page Analysis functionality we created in that has been invaluable. That said, I’m not there yet. The plugin still has a gazillion settings that you need to find your way through and I’m not happy with that. Functionality to fix that will be coming soon.

Another big big thanks is due for the guys at Level Level who designed the logo for this plugin, in the same style as the logo for my Google Analytics plugin. Guys: you rock!

Google News Module

Today I also finished the work on the Google News SEO Module, the first official module for my WP SEO plugin. It’s free, if you’re in Google News you should really start using it right now!

Update!

So, it’s there. If you were already running the plugin, update to 1.0, if not, install it now, have fun and tell me in the comments both why you use the plugin and what you’d like to see next! If you want to thank me, a donation is sincerely appreciated. All of the money that comes in in donations is spent on hiring the best WordPress developers to help me improve on this plugin even quicker.

A good example of that is that I hired Jon Cave, a WP Core Contributor, to build the XML Sitemaps API that allows this plugin to easily create XML sitemaps for the very large blogs it’s used on.

Read more: Why you should buy Yoast SEO Premium »