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Integrating Yoast SEO

This documentation is a hub for describing the technical specifications and requirements for integrating Yoast SEO.

Automatic optimization​

The following standards must be met, automatically and without user intervention, when the software is installed and activated.

System behavior​

  • The site must output and use 'pretty permalinks' (human-readable, structured URLs).
  • All public-facing URLs, meta tags and content must be rendered server-side, in the initial response from the server. Client-side rendering solutions are not supported.
  • The site must output a complete and valid XML Sitemap.
  • The site must generate (or alter) a robots.txt file.

Integrations​

  • Creating, updating or publishing content should ping IndexNow (and ping the XML Sitemap to Google).

Metadata & output​

Meta tags​

All pages and content types should output metadata in line with the following standards:

Structured data​

All pages should output structured data in line with the following standards:

Controls & Analysis​

For all posts, pages and content types, users must:

  • Be able to Analyze their content.
  • Be provided with Controls.
  • Be able to edit page titles and descriptions in bulk (without needing to visit/open each individual page).

Integrating our Analysis tools​

At the moment, much of our analysis is tied deeply into either our WordPress or Shopify integrations. In the (near) future, we hope to increasingly de-couple our analysis tools from their respective back-ends, and to create a 'standalone' editor. We aim to make this easy to implement in any content editing context, simply by "pointing" it at the relevant fields (and "hooking up" relevant back-end behaviour based on user settings and controls).

We encourage integrators to pursue this method, rather than (re)building our analysis tools from scratch in their own context.

Resources​

  • A simple example standalone app, which includes readability and SEO analysis (for multiple keyphrases and synonyms) as well as a working snippet preview (with replacemant variables)
    • Note that this currently excludes our inclusive language, formality, insights, and social previews checks/features.
  • Documentation on how to configure and integrate the standalone app.

Note that these resources should be considered a work in progress, and might not be stable in production environments. If you encounter problems or errors, we encourage you to create issues on the respective repositories, and/or to contribute fixes and patches.

Rough roadmap​

Whilst we can't provide specific timeframes on our roadmap, we can outline the key steps that we still need to undertake in order to release a stable production version of our 'agnostic' tools. This may be subject to change.

  • Convert NPM packages to built code.
  • Restructure various Yoast GitHub repositories (de-coupling/moving various modules).
  • Formal testing and release.