Yoast SEO 17.7: Introducing a free configuration workout

These past couple of months, we’ve brought you several innovative SEO workouts. Our workouts help break down specific SEO tasks so that you can follow a step-by-step process to fulfill these tasks. They are easy and practical, targeted at getting your work done without issue. In Yoast SEO 17.7, we’re introducing a new configuration workout to help you set up the Yoast SEO plugin properly from the get-go.

Starting from Yoast SEO 18.9, we are replacing this configuration workout with our new first-time configuration. Read all about the new first-time configuration in our Yoast SEO 18.9 release post.

What are SEO workouts?

There are a ton of things you need to do to optimize your site for search engines. After installing Yoast SEO, some of the technical work is done for you, but there is still so much you need to do yourself. Yoast SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. You have to put in the work and do it regularly.

But there are hundreds of things you can do with SEO. Different routes lead to the same goal. Different ways of thinking and doing. Where do you even start? That’s one of the reasons we came up with the SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium. The workouts are actionable exercises focused on a particular task, like fixing your site structure by proper internal linking. Or, cleaning up outdated content. Let us take you by the hand!

Our newest SEO workout is all about getting the basic settings of Yoast SEO right and it is free to use for everyone. This helps you properly introduce your site to Google, helping them quickly get to know you. This workout replaces the old configuration wizard and, of course, you only have to do this workout once.

Getting the basic settings right in Yoast SEO

Getting the basic setup right is very important — it’s like handing your business card over to Google. It’s nothing fancy, but it does a lot to help search engines’ understanding of your site. Unfortunately, many people forget this all-important first step. Or, they haven’t filled it entirely or maybe haven’t looked at it for quite some time. That’s unfortunate because now you might hand Google a business card with outdated information — or nothing on it at all!

The new configuration workout in Yoast SEO 17.7 aims to fix this problem quickly. We’ve identified the key steps you need to take to set everything up correctly. Here’s the rundown:

• Run the SEO data optimizer to help Yoast SEO build an understanding of your site.
• Choose the site representation for Schema.org structured data. Google uses this structured data to identify who you are or what your business is.
  • Choose whether your site represents a person or an organization
  • Fill in the name of the person or organization
  • Upload a logo or an avatar
  • Fill in the tagline of the site
• Fill in the corresponding social profiles for this site or person
• The final two steps ask if you want to share data with Yoast that we can use to improve our products. Plus, you can sign up for our newsletter.
• That’s it, you’re good to go!

Yoast SEO will use the information you enter about your site in its structured data output. We tie every part of your site together and serve that to the search engines in that output. The more you provide to search engines, the better they can understand it! Need more insights into that process? Join our resident SEO expert Jono Alderson for his free webinar Boost your organic visibility with structured data.

Of course, there’s no need to run the configuration workout if you already filled everything out before. But, it can’t hurt to check your settings. Your existing settings will remain active until you run the configuration workout — we won’t override anything unless you tell us to do so.

What else is new in Yoast SEO 17.7?

Every new release of Yoast SEO comes with a round of fixes and enhancements. In Yoast SEO 17.7, we improved several things, including two language-related improvements. We’ve added more French transition words to the list so the transition words assessment in the plugin can recognize these. We’ve also fixed a bug where non-passive Greek words ending in -ου or -είτε were previously identified as passive.

Update now to Yoast SEO 17.7

Yoast SEO 17.7 comes with a new, free addition to our SEO workouts. The SEO workouts you can find in Yoast SEO Premium help you get your SEO tasks done in a structured way. The newest one is available for everyone and allows you to set up your site data correctly from the start. Try it!