WP-SEO is the Ultimate Wordpress SEO Plugin – Throw the Rest Away
Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the Wordpress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it – I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post – I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:
- It allows you to change your html title tags
- You have fine grained control of making the title tag
- The title can be any combination of title, separator, blogname, label, or keywords
- You can individually choose a different title format for home, articles, pages, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages
- Easily change the separator to anything you want (for instance, don’t use WP >> default, use | instead)
- Give separate labels to home, article, page, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages for use in the title tag
- Choose to display the pagenumber, author, or even display a title field in your ‘write’ page to override with your own when required
- It allows you to convert your meta description tags
- Set a default value
- Choose either the default value, titles of all listed posts, or part of the first post as description tags
- Choose to use description of the category for category pages
- Individually assign different choices for meta description for home, articles, pages, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages
- Choose the value for the number of words to be displayed in the meta description tag
- Enable a description field on the ‘write’ page to write your own description when required
- You can even convert the meta keywords tags
- Set a default value
- Set a dynamic value (as in the title and description options)
- Choose the number of words
- Choose the minimum number of letters for keywords
- Blacklist certain keywords
- choices for autocompletion, using only nouns, relevance, and labeling
- Enable a keywords field on the ‘write’ page to write your own when required
- An option for highlighting content areas using the adsense google_ad_section code
- Option to eliminate duplicate content indexing by automatically inserting robots nofollow tags on appropriate pages
- Option to not index RSS feed
- Rename uploaded files with title instead of filename
- An option to download all plugin settings in an XML file, so you can ‘import’ it in other sites you want to have the same settings (BIG time saver)
The only other thing you should know about this plugin are that before you activate it, you need to comment out any other title or meta keyword or description tags listed in your header.php file (which you most likely will have). If you’re not sure whether you got them all or not, this plugin even has a ‘compatibility check’ on the WP SEO plugin settings page that will look for double tags and alert you if there are any before you turn it on.
Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this – and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).
Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site – it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in Wordpress – leave them now below!
Hi thanks for this very informative post, I just found it on technorati, well I too have been experimenting with WordPress plug-ins on my own blog. I’ve also written an article about some popular and useful plug-ins.
If you are interested here take a look.
http://markettreasure.com/2007/09/04/some-plugins-i-added/
And once again good post, and keep it up.
September 4th, 2007 at 8:46 pmThis is another great SEO plugin for wordpress, I enjoy using this combined with quite a few other plugins. Including the All in One SEO pack and the category base killer. They both work well in optimizing your blog.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:29 pmLooks good, but I think you over did it with the anchor text
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:59 pmThanks for the info. I don’t know about you, but anytime i can consolidate seo plugins i’m all for it.
October 9th, 2008 at 8:29 pmWow this is an awesome plug-in, I’m currently using All in One SEO, but after reading this post I think that a change is in mind. This will do such wonders for my SEO and SEM campaigns.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:20 pmHow does this compare to All in One SEO Zombie?
October 16th, 2008 at 5:49 amI use all in one seo, duplicate content cure, and a no-www plugin. It does most of the stuff I need to get the job done. From you list it seems to have more options, but I don’t like juggling in and out plugins unless I have to =(
Sounds like something I’ve been looking for but a non-wordpress script. Most my pages get the same title and same keywords, which isn’t very search friendly. One of these days I’m going to install wordpress and really check it out. I’ll keep your blog most in mind for future reference.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:25 amThis plug-in is very cool and I will recommend it to our clients.
November 1st, 2008 at 4:26 pmah, i wondered who had taken this over as i heard it was unsupported as of late. Great plugin though, never causesd a single problem and the SEO benefits are just sweet:)
November 10th, 2008 at 8:05 pmThe plug-in is splendid! I’m gonna tell it to my friend who has some problems with it!
November 11th, 2008 at 5:38 pmThanks!
both, All-in-One SEO and WP-SEO, are very good plugins, but there is one more thing. i heard a lot times that google is as well checking pages for “over-optimization”. and this can lead to a worse ranking, as pages look too artificial to google.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:26 pmwhat i’m missing in both tools is something i would call the “dirt parameter”. something you could turn on and the plugin would put a small amount of SEO mistakes into pages.
i cannot remember where i read this “over-optimization” article but as soon as i will find again i’ll post it here.
Even though the plug-in works, it takes a balanced approach, don’t you think: links, articles, on-site stuff, press releases. It is a whole package, not just the parts. Besides, it is very informative to surf and read some of these articles and blogs and, at the same time, leave link-bearing gifts. No?
November 16th, 2008 at 8:31 amI think the plug in is fantastic. I love it.
November 21st, 2008 at 4:29 amThis plug-in is very cool and I will recommend it
December 7th, 2008 at 4:23 pmSEO plugins for wordpress is a must if you intend on ranking well in search engines. As Jeremy mentioned above, page titles and meta tags that are common on all pages of your site is NOT good.
Another SEO tip for wordpress is to change the link structure to your posts. WP uses default numbered id’s in URL’s which is not very search engine friendly. You would do well to have a link structure using post names in the URL.
December 24th, 2008 at 8:47 pmHmm, this plugin seems very useful, I might test it, thanks for sharing. I wonder what are people’s opinions on this plugin.
December 27th, 2008 at 10:44 pmHmmm…I’ve been using the All-in-One plugin for the WP blogs I’ve set up. I might have to switch to this one. Thanks for the article.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:52 pmThank you for the informative tip, the plugin is great! Like you said, it will take place of a few others that I am currently using. Keep it up and keep those tips coming!
January 8th, 2009 at 4:14 pmSimply fantastic results. I recommend it to every WP user.
January 13th, 2009 at 5:52 pmI’ve used the All in one seo plugin for all my wp blogs in the past. Perhaps I will try this one out and compare. Thanks for the share!
January 13th, 2009 at 9:32 pmI just happened upon this and since I’m pretty new to blogging, it caught my attention since it seems that it will be something to help my get higher in the search engines. Others here have mentioned All in one SEO plugin and others… this WP SEO seems like it will be better and it covers more ground. Sounds cool. Just hope I can figure it out. Thanks for this great information.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:54 am- Sally
That’s plug-in is awesome and i will use and recommend it on our blog also
thanks for info and this plug-in give fine grained SEO controller for WordPress
Regards
Kelly Allen
February 26th, 2009 at 5:52 pmseo never die..if talking about seo, i like wordpress and all in one seo plugin to do search engine optimization.It is great tool to optimize your blog.
March 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pmWell, personally, I use the plugin called all in one seo. It is very effective and I recommend everyone to use it.
April 24th, 2009 at 3:52 pmI couldn’t find a direct link to the WP-SEO plugin. You have lots of link in your post, but they all redirects to anything but the plugin. Would be nice if added a direct link.
Regards,
May 5th, 2009 at 6:54 pmAndrew
I’m using also seo plugin for wordpress. But I leave it as default.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:34 amI no longer recommend All in One SEO pack, you should try Platinum SEO Pack now. It does so much more…
May 18th, 2009 at 5:38 pmWow I’m impressed. It contain 90% of the functions I need. Thanks a million.
May 25th, 2009 at 8:55 pmNot only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”
June 6th, 2009 at 4:42 pmYou’ve managed to enumerate the reasons why we should try WP SEO plug-in and I’m now excited to use it to enhance my blogging experience. Maybe you could also post some comparison with other popular plug-ins in the future.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:38 amThe features of this plug-ins are really fascinating! I’ve also read other blogs claiming that WP-SEO is the best plug-in to use. Maybe I should try getting one and experience its unique benefits.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:25 amThis plug-in is very cool and I will recommend it to our clients
June 15th, 2009 at 8:25 amWell, personally, I use the plugin called all in one seo. It is very effective and I recommend everyone to use it.
June 30th, 2009 at 9:51 amI was looking for this kind of wp seo plugin will install it thanks!
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 amOnline Degree Education´s last blog ..Getting Down To It with a Business Degree Online
this is seriously by far the best plugin that I have stumbled across even 2 years after the launch.
I use it for my blog as well as all my clients.
really appreciate it.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:07 amThis is an amazing plugin. So helpful, thank you!
November 30th, 2009 at 9:37 pm