Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO Plugins
This article is a WordPress Beginners Guide to SEO Plugins and which ones are the best options for your WordPress blog. Included will also be some tips about what are 3 important SEO html tags and what they mean for your blog.
WordPress by default has little to no SEO Optimization built into the core functionality of WordPress. There is no META Description, TITLE or META Keywords HTML tags set by WordPress when you write and publish an article in 99% of all Free WordPress themes that exist. Some paid WordPress themes like Thesis do have excellent SEO capabilities built into the Theme and in this case as long as you configure the SEO options in the theme you should be fine.
For those of us who don’t have a WordPress theme that has SEO configuration built in, you need a WordPress plugin. Not just any plugin will do either, there are 3 that people trust and use the most:
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is by far the most common and popular at over 7 million downloads since its release in the WordPress extension library. This is the plugin that I use and am hesitant to switch off of it because of negative problems when experimenting with another SEO Plugin last year.
Platinum SEO Pack
The Platinum SEO Pack is very popular and some claim it is better and more easily configurable than All in One SEO Pack, I have only looked at the plugin in my sandbox and haven’t made a switch but at over 490,000 downloads this is the 2nd most downloaded WordPress SEO plugin.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
The WordPress SEO by Yoast is a newer SEO Plugin written by Joost De Valk and has about 79k downloads at the time of this writing, I dug deeper and think this plugin may be probably one of the best out of the 20 I reviewed. If I were daring I would probably switch from All in One SEO to WordPress SEO by Yoast as the features and configuration of the plugin are exceptional.
Now, when you have these plugins you need to spend some time learning how to configure them properly, though there are different instructions for each plugin the basics are the same. You want to make sure each plugin includes the following 3 HTML tags in your articles, pages and homepage.
3 Most Important HTML SEO Tags
TITLE Tag
This tag is the title of your article that displays on the Google Search results page and also on the top bar of your browser tab/window. This should be keyword optimized and by default many SEO plugins will include | “yourblog” in the title so your blog name always shows up in the title of every page. This is also a good thing for when people see the Google results they see which blog the page is hosted on without having to look at the URL itself.
Description Tag
This is very important and is the description under the Title on the Google Search Results page, the description should include the keywords you are targeting. Google will bold what keywords were searched for and as you can see from the above image, my search for Warhammer and Dragon Blogger are in my Title and Description tags.
Keywords Tag
Meta Keywords is not really being used by Google to rank pages according to Google themselves, however some search engines can still use keywords and since you don’t know what may or may not factor Meta Keywords it is important to have it listed. I would rank the Keywords as being the least “important” of the 3 major SEO tags, but I would still make sure you have 5-10 keywords for every article.
Now, besides leveraging the HTML tags for SEO there are other configurations that WordPress SEO Plugins should be configured to do. These include canonical URL’s which basically are an HTML tag that tells a page where the original source of the page is. This is ideal for search results, archives, category pages that may just be reprint pages for the original article. Some SEO Plugins will also make edits to the robots.txt file on your blog so that you can exclude Archives, Tags from being indexed by Google at all which is very important.
My Experience with SEO Plugins has told me that once you choose an SEO plugin and start configuring it you should stay with it for at least 6 months, if you don’t feel you are satisfied with it’s performance switch plugin and give another 6 months to compare traffic difference. It takes around 20-30 days before various indexing and such will get factored, and you can see when I switched from All in One SEO Pack to Greg’s High Performance SEO from July 2010 – September 2010, you can see the Negative SEO Impact was tremendous!
This graph shows you that I was averaging around 800-1000 visits per day until around August, then my traffic dropped by 70% to only about 180-200 visits per day, it remained this way until I switched back to using All in One SEO Pack in late September, and it took until Mid October for my blog traffic to start climbing again. You can see now my blog is back on top with averages of over 1200 visits per day but when looking at my Google Analytics from a yearly view, it is a huge decline in traffic for that 2 month period. This is why I don’t recommend Greg’s High Performance SEO Pack and I am hesitant to switch from All in One SEO Pack to any other WordPress plugin (Even though the Yoast plugin looks promising).
WordPress SEO
So it is important which SEO Plugin you use for WordPress, and I highly recommend you put some time and thought into choosing one. I also recommend you take the extra 10-15 minutes to keyword optimize your Title, Description, Keywords and make sure your targeted keywords are evenly scattered and listed in your article. Search Results matter, and making sure your article is optimized for SEO is imperative to ranking well in the Google Search results as well as other search engines like Bing.
-Justin Germino
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