WordPress SEO 2.0: focus on what matters

We’re proud to announce the availability of WordPress SEO 2.0. This release adds new features for Google’s Knowledge Graph and improves the design, layout & usability of the WordPress SEO plugins admin screens in many ways.

Google Knowledge Graph

Google recently introduced new features for their knowledge graph, allowing you to highlight yourself in the search results as either a company or a person. This includes you or your company’s name, if your site is for a company, the logo:

And it includes your social profiles (this is the list of social networks Google supports in their social markup):

If Google has picked this all up and shows a Knowledge Graph block for you or your company (note that we can’t force it to do that), it would look like this:

Simplified the admin menus

We’ve decided to move several admin pages under one “Advanced” page, and several tools to a new “Tools” page. This makes our entire admin structure a lot cleaner (note the screenshots are for WordPress SEO premium), compare the old (left) versus the new (right):

While this might seem mostly a superficial change, it’s very important in how we think you should perceive our plugin. The most important thing you can do in SEO is write good content; the most important section of the plugin is thus the metabox on the edit post / pages. While the features hidden under the Advanced menu are very useful, they’re not going to make your ranking go from poor to awesome. By moving them all to one advanced page, we hope to make that emphasis more obvious.

WordPress SEO Premium changes

Speed improvement

Not a feature, but a very welcome change: we’ve made WordPress SEO Premium much, much faster in this release. You’ll notice this in the admin of your site almost immediately.

Updated videos

Because we’ve changed all the admin screens, all the videos had to be redone, so in WordPress SEO Premium 2.0 you’ll find a completely new set of 13 videos made by Shawn Hesketh of WP101. This is the first of these 13 videos you’ll get with WordPress SEO Premium:

Version number changes

With this release we’ve also made the version number of WordPress SEO and WordPress SEO premium the same. They’re both called 2.0. We will keep them the same throughout future releases, so we only have to communicate one version number.

Go update!

Go update your WordPress SEO and let us know what you think!