Yoast SEO 13.5 adds support for Spanish word forms

While we’re working on getting Yoast SEO 14.0 ready for the world, you can enjoy today’s release of Yoast SEO 13.5. In this release, we’re adding word form support for a new language: Spanish. Spanish joins, Dutch, German and English, and we’re working on more languages. Read all about Yoast SEO 13.5!

An easier, more flexible text analysis

Since Yoast SEO 9.0, we’ve been making our keyphrase analysis smarter to make the process of editing a text with Yoast SEO more natural. More invisible, so to say, so you can focus on creating that epic piece of content. 

Thanks to the innovative way of working with language, the plugin is now much less restrictive in finding your focus keyphrase. It has become smarter. In the past, you often found yourself working according to the rules of the plugin, but not anymore. Now, you don’t have to try to fit your focus keyphrase awkwardly in a sentence to make the plugin happy. No, since Yoast SEO 9.0 the plugin recognizes all parts of your focus keyphrase automatically — and the words don’t even have to be in the same order.

That’s all happening in the free version of Yoast SEO, but Premium analysis ups the ante. Here, word form support comes into play. 

Yoast SEO 13.5: Premium analysis in Spanish

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis not only picks out your focus keyphrases flawlessly inside a sentence, but it also looks at words forms of your keyphrase. Word forms can be anything, from plurals (e.g., perro – perros), verb forms (e.g., aplicar – apliques) to adverbs (e.g., actual – actualmente). In Yoast SEO Premium 13.5, Spanish language users can also benefit from this.

Now, if you write naturally your focus keyphrase will become much easier to find because it looks at different forms as well. All these instances count towards the correct keyphrase density of your text. 

That’s not all, because Yoast SEO Premium offers something else that you can use in conjuncture with word forms: support for synonyms and related keyphrases. By adding different related keyphrases, you can write a text that fully covers your specific topic. This includes all relevant terms users use to talk about this subject.

¿Ya estás convencido? Are you convinced yet?

Need a recap? Check out this video that explains it perfectly:

Word forms are now supported in:

• English (since Yoast SEO 9.0)
• German (since Yoast SEO 10.1)
• Dutch (since Yoast SEO 13.4)
• Spanish (since Yoast SEO 13.5)

Of course, we have more language on the way. We collected all the supported languages in our SEO analysis on our features per language page.

Help us improve Spanish support

Today, we introduce word form support for our Spanish language users. This version is fully functional and works really well, but it might still be a little rough around the edges. Please test it thoroughly and report back your findings.

In addition, we’d like your help adding word form support for other languages. Each language is different, so you need a new word form recognition mechanisms in each language. Up to now, our in-house team of linguists refined and adapted the word form recognition mechanism in each language until it delivered the best possible quality.

This process has a major advantage: you get the best quality right in the first release. But it also has a downside, as it takes a while before a word form mechanism can cope with all the intricacies and irregularities in a language. As we want to provide word form recognition in more and more languages, this process will take longer. To speed up the process, we are changing things for the upcoming languages.

In the future, we’re building on existing word form recognition mechanisms. We need your help, though. To improve these existing mechanisms, we’d like native speakers — or experts — in that language to give us feedback. We’re working on a new feedback system to allow you to send your suggestions or improvements from within the plugin. For now, if you encounter strange things or want to help out, you can send us an email, comment on this post or make an issue on our GitHub repository. Thanks!

Update to Yoast SEO 13.5

Yoast SEO 13.5 is out. In it, you’ll find a great enhancement for our Spanish language users: word form support! Word forms help you to write a better article while spending less time on making Yoast SEO happy, we hope. If not, please let us know so we can improve it.