Yoast SEO 15.0: Support for Arabic, plus a new table of contents block

Today, we’re launching Yoast SEO 15.0. This release features some awesome new additions and enhancements. We’ve added full support for Arabic, made a new block for the block editor and made the Yoast SEO block editor sidebar fully-featured. So, high time to take a look at Yoast SEO 15.0!

What to expect in Yoast SEO 15.0?

In Yoast SEO 15.0, we have three main focal points:

• Full readability (free and Premium) and word form support (Premium) for the Arabic language;
• A new table of contents block with jump link support (Premium);
• An improved sidebar in the block editor with new screens (free and Premium).

Of course, this release also comes with a round of fixes and enhancements. Short on time? Simply check the changelog (free or Premium) for this release to see what’s new.

Readability and word form support for Arabic

In Yoast SEO 14.8, we started our journey in the world of right-to-left-languages with Arabic keyphrase recognition. This is an essential first step in getting to fully understand a language so we can bring support for our advanced language features. In Yoast SEO 15.0, we’re adding readability support for Arabic in free. Also, Premium users get to enjoy full word form support in Arabic starting today.

With the readability analysis, Yoast SEO helps you produce a powerful piece of content. We help you keep your content focused and easy to read. Plus, Yoast SEO gives you feedback on what you can improve to make it even better. All of this is now available for anyone writing in Arabic.

Of course, that’s not all! In Yoast SEO Premium, we have something called word form support. This is an advanced analysis that makes our language tools a lot smarter. For instance, it takes grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase in account. This makes the process of optimizing a text a lot more natural and flexible. After English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Russian and Polish, we’re now introducing word forms support for Arabic!

Interested to see how that works? Check out the video below.

Find out more about the language analyses and the languages Yoast SEO supports at the moment.

Table of contents block in Premium

We’re always looking for ways to make your work easier to find and understand by both users and search engines. Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about how to structure text to make it more readable and attractive. One of the tools that can help you improve the scanability of an article is a table of contents at the top of the page. For longer articles, these are a must-have but even shorter articles can benefit from them.

In Yoast SEO 15.0, we’re adding a simple table of contents block for our Premium users.

It is a simple block for the WordPress block editor that automatically renders a table of contents for the current page and it takes into account all headers and hierarchy. The block is very easy to use and you can edit the results of the table of contents block as you see fit. The table of content block automatically updates whenever you make changes to your text.

A chance at getting jump links in Google search

There’s a second reason for adding this block, namely jump links. The way we built the table of contents block encourages Google to include ‘jump links’ in the search results. You can see these links underneath a search result and these allow you to see the sections of a page from within the SERP, and to click directly to the relevant section. This also ties in neatly with Googles work on linking to specific text fragments straight from the search results.

It works like magic: we simply add an ID attribute to every header and use those to automatically fill the table of contents. Now, Google can use these anchors to show them in search.

Here’s a quick overview of how the block works:

The Yoast SEO sidebar is now full-featured

For some time, we’ve been gradually improving the Yoast SEO experience in the block editor. Today, we’re adding a big one: a much improved sidebar with expandable modals. In this new sidebar, you can now find all the post settings, including the advanced settings, the Schema tab and internal linking suggestions (Premium). Finally, everything is in one place! The sidebar is now on par with the good-old meta box.

Simply click on the tabs to expand them. The one with a down arrow expands in the sidebar itself, while a click on the pencil icon will open a new overlay screen.

For some time, you could find the Google preview in the block editor sidebar. Today, we’re also adding the social previews to the sidebar. Clicking on the Google preview, will open a new screen with additional settings, like the meta description and SEO title. Premium users also get full-featured social previews in these modals. This is one of the cool features of Yoast SEO Premium, and you now get much quicker access to it — and it looks better as well.

Other fixes and enhancements

As always, we do a lot of behind the scenes work to improve the plugin. In this release, we made some fixes in our Schema implementation, including one where in some instances the value of the Schema type @type could contain null. Thanks to Joseph Paul, we added a wpseo_sitemap_index_links filter to enable adding links to the sitemap index.

We’ve also improved our handling of languages. For one, we’ve expanded our list of English transition words, to make the transition word assessment more accurate. In addition, we can better find keyphrases and prominent words from words in the text that have specific Arabic or Urdu punctuation marks.

Yoast SEO 15.0

That’s it for Yoast SEO 15.0! In this release, we have three major enhancements: Arabic language support, a new and improved block editor sidebar and a new table of contents block. We hope you enjoy this release.