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Hello, I’m MaAnna with BlogAid and in this quick video I’ll show you the changes in
the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. He released a major update on March 11 and you will definitely
want to know about the new features and settings. The first changes are in the Social section.
So scroll down, and be sure to go to SEO > Social. In the Facebook section, the OpenGraph object
type of page is now more accurate. So be sure to check that box, and then scroll
down to save the changes. Next, go the Twitter tab.
The last drop-down has been added for “The default card type to use”
The choices are Summary and Summary with Large Image.
Now, be sure to read the note at the top that to get this to work, you have to check the
box to Add Twitter card meta data and then validate your Twitter Cards.
Check that, and save changes. The next change is in the Google+ tab.
The option at the top has been changed. I’m going to jump over to a site that I
haven’t updated the plugin on yet to show you what it used to look like. It used to
have Author for Home page, which you needed to set as Don’t Show to keep authorship
from being added to pages. Let’s jump back to the updated site.
Now it has a checkbox for Add Google+ specific post meta data (excluding author metadata).
It is unchecked by default. Here’s exactly what Yoast says about it,
“For Google+ and rel author implementation, we’ve taken away some of the features as
they were leading to issues with Google. The default setting of the plugin is now to only
show rel=author on single posts and nowhere else. Enabling or disabling rel=author for
a post type is very easy from the Titles & metas page, should you wish to. You can no longer
show rel=author on the homepage as Google has been pretty clear about not wanting that.”
I put a comment on his blog for help clarifying whether to check the box or not. My best guess
at this point is that you do check it to put everything but author metadata on pages. I’ll
let you know if I find out differently. And of course, if you have a Google Publisher
page, you’ll want to put the link for that here, and then save changes.
If you’re wondering where that global setting he mentions is, go to Titles & Metas and the
the Post Types tab. It’s here under Posts. Leave the box unchecked because you do want
to show rel=author on posts. Scroll down to the Pages section and check
the box because you don’t want to show rel=author on pages.
You’ll also want to go to the Permalinks section and check to see if the update changes
the Remove stop words and Redirect attachment URLs.
The Bulk Title Editor is new. It shows an admin type listing of all of your pages and
posts with a field where you can update the SEO title.
The Bulk Description Editor is also new. Shows an admin type listing of all of your pages
and posts with a field where you can update the Meta Description. Besides this bulk editor,
the way the plugin used the database for the meta description information has undergone
a major overhaul. This is one of the things that will speed up the plugin and make it
less of a drag on your site performance. And the Extensions section is new. It displays
all of Yoast’s available plugins. Another speed improvement is to the way the
XML sitemap is generated, which gave it a 70% decrease in the number of queries it had
to make to create the sitemap. So that’s super.
You may want to hold off updating this plugin for just a bit. Bug reports are still coming
in. I found one. When I have the admin pages for this plugin active, such as the Dashboard,
I can’t click on any other one besides the Dashboard.
When I actually do that, then I can get to any other admin page.
I’m sure Team Yoast is working *** all of the bugs and will likely have the majority
of them fixed in a short while. I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick first look
at the new WordPress SEO plugin. It’s the same type of info I deliver in my full SEO
and AuthorRank video course. For more video tutorials, be sure to visit BlogAid.net and
click the Videos link.