Innovations by Yoast

Aligning our products and ourselves with the latest changes online requires continuous innovation. That’s why we continually dive into new techniques to see how we can utilize them. To benefit you and our products. On this page, you can find the innovations we have implemented or are currently working on.

Image innovations page of person holding light bulb

Help online agents understand your site

Structured data

Structured data helps search engines and AI tools understand your content. Yoast SEO adds this data automatically and builds a single, connected graph for your site. That means your content, products, and pages are described in a clear, consistent way that search engines can interpret and connect. Resulting in a better chance of getting rich results.

Indexables

An important part of what our plugin does is connecting your pages to one another. Think, for example, of our breadcrumbs feature, our internal linking suggestions and our dashboard. 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.

Word form recognition

The word form functionality, or morphology, brings our SEO analysis to the next level. Before, we were only able to look for exact matches of the keyphrase in the text. Now, our plugin recognizes all possible word-forms of the words that comprise the keyphrase. This allows you to optimize your content in a more natural way.

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.

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.

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.