A while back we released Yoast SEO 9.0. This was a huge release for us, as we made our SEO analysis smarter. Thanks to something called stemming, i.e. breaking words down to their smallest form to do complex analysis on, we can now detect word forms. Since then, improving your content has become a much more realistic process as the plugin is better at finding your most important words inside your content. In addition, users of Yoast SEO Premium can improve their content using synonyms and related keyphrases. Today, we’re rolling out word form support to a new language: German.
Wortformen auf Deutsch!
While writing a German language article about the joys of Yoast SEO, your keyphrase might be “Die Yoast SEO Analyse richtig verwenden”. As of today, Yoast SEO Premium will now take other forms — for instance, singulars, plurals, comparatives or past-tense variants — of those words into account as well, even if they are spread across a sentence:
- “Wie verwendet man die Yoast SEO Analyse?”
- “Wie du die Yoast SEO Analyse richtig verwendest”
- “Wie ich die Yoast SEO Analyse richtig verwendet habe”
- und so weiter.
No longer do you have to fight to use the words in the same form as in your focus keyphrase. Awesome right? Word form support makes it a lot easier to improve your text, because the Yoast SEO plugin automatically takes different forms of the same word into account as well. If you write naturally, these words and word forms often end up in your text without you thinking about it. By using word forms, Yoast SEO Premium makes the process of optimizing content more flexible, natural and realistic. It’s liberating!
We’d also like to remind our German language Yoast SEO Premium users that they can use related keyphrases and synonyms. Using these features together, you can use Yoast SEO to paint a complete picture of your subject and have it checked thoroughly. Together, we make your best content yet — enjoyed by both users and search engines!
Read our glossary of terms if you need more insights or watch the video below, this explains some of the concepts mentioned:
And don’t forget the infographic that makes these definitions instantly clear!
Our team of linguists spent a serious amount of time bringing the morphology features to other languages. Following English, German is the first in what will, hopefully, be a long line of languages to receive full language support. Stay tuned to see what’s next!
Other language updates in Yoast SEO 10.1
Besides working on getting German full morphological support, our linguists also worked on improving the current languages. For instance, for Swedish we now use a much improved list of transition words. And thanks to Sílvia Fustegueres, we can introduce a better list of Catalan transition words. Not only that, she helped us increase the recommended sentence length limit for Spanish and Catalan. Now, these are more in line with best practices in these languages. Thanks, Sílvia!
Spring cleaning and enhancements
Spring has arrived and that means it’s time to clean up some stuff. Once every while, we go through the plugin to identify and remove all the functionality that we deprecated. This time we looked at functionality from before Yoast SEO 6.1.
Out with the old, in with the new. Here are some of the other changes in Yoast SEO 10.1. With the demise of Google+ it doesn’t make sense to keep mentions of that, right? In return, we added a LinkedIn profile URL field in the user profiles. We’ve also added a Wikipedia URL field to the social accounts list, to be used in sameAs Schema.org output. We’ve aso removed the og:image:alt tag as it causes potential accessibility issues when sharing content via Facebook.
Update to Yoast SEO 10.1
So there you have it, Yoast SEO 10.1 offers a lot on the language front. Users in the German speaking market can now enjoy everything Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium have to offer. Word form support unlocks a whole range of ways to improve content by using the improved SEO analysis, synonyms and related keyphrases. Yoast SEO has your back!