Yoast SEO 15.2: Swedish word forms, Slack URLs, performance

Today, we are releasing Yoast SEO 15.2 into the wild. For this release, we’ve focussed on providing word form support for another language: Swedish. We have also added an interesting improvement for Slack users — better visibility for your content when your URL is shared on Slack. Last but not least, we improved the performance of the plugin in the backend due to us loading less JavaScript.

Swedish word form support in Yoast SEO Premium

High-quality content is essential for getting your site noticed by readers and search engines alike. Making your content awesome can be hard, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-optimizing your articles by using your focus keyphrase over and over again. Writing like this leads to content that’s hard to read. Since adding our readability analysis, Yoast SEO helps you to circumvent these problems and improve your writing. Yoast SEO Premium takes that to another level and enables you to drastically improve your content.

The Premium analysis makes the writing process much more natural. It’s flexible and smart, helping you improve your articles without having to go to great lengths to fit in your focus keyphrases awkwardly. We’ve added quite a few languages over the last couple of months and we’re adding a new one today. As of 15.2, Yoast SEO Premium is much better at finding your focus keyphrases in Swedish, even if the words are in a different grammatical form — and spread across a sentence.

Here’s a video that explains how it works — in Swedish, of course.

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis also comes with support for synonyms and related keyphrases. Using synonyms in your text makes the content come alive and reduces the need for repetition of your main focus keyphrase. By also adding related keyphrases, you can paint a complete picture of your subject, making the text rich and authoritative.

Make your URL stand out on Slack

Slack is an incredibly popular and powerful tool for professional communication. Today, in a world where we hardly come into the office anymore tools like Slack are a godsend. At Yoast, we use Slack a lot and we came up with a nifty little addition that makes sharing URLs on there much more helpful.

Our new Enhanced Slack sharing feature adds an author byline and an estimated reading time to your metadata. If you share a URL from your site on Slack, it will now look much better and gives you more information about who wrote it and how long it would take to read. We’ve also added it to our WooCommerce SEO plugin so product metadata will also show up on Slack. You can turn the feature on and off in SEO > General > Features as you can read in our Help article on Enhanced Slack sharing.

Performance improvements

We’re always working on the performance of our plugin. This time, we focused on improving the handling of JavaScript inside the admin. On some pages, we would load more JavaScript than needed. We now split our JavaScript bundles better, which means that we load as much as 2.5MB less on some pages. While this does not speed up your site, it does make the experience in the backend that much more pleasant.

Other enhancements

In Yoast SEO 15.2, we have a couple of nice enhancements. First, we’ve added an Open Graph integration for The Events Calendar. The purpose, of course, is to provide a tighter integration of the Schema code generated by The Events Calendar plugin. It transforms the Schema code generated by The Events Calendar and puts it into a Schema_Piece. Props to Hendrik Luehrsen for making this happen.

Secondly, we now set the default Schema type for Web Stories to Article as that is what they should be according to Google. Thanks for helping get that in, Pascal Birchler. Thirdly, Jonny Harris helped us add a filter to WPSEO_Image_Utils class, to allow highjacking of image meta data. This filter is especially useful for those using a plugin that loads image from a third party source like S3 or Unsplash.

Yoast SEO 15.2: Get it now

Yoast SEO 15.2 comes with a nice set of improvements. For Premium users, we’ve added word form support for the Swedish language. We added a cool new way to help your URLs stand out on Slack, plus we’ve improved the performance of the plugin in the backend.

We hope you enjoy Yoast SEO 15.2!