SEO plugins for WordPress

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked “what’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress?” My immediate reply (trying to keep the look of exasperation off my face) is to ask, “in terms of what?” Think of it this way, what if someone asked you what’s the best car or best place to live? For me these questions are impossible to answer without some guidelines. What makes a car the best car or some place the best place?! Define that and then I can answer. So I’m going to tell you what would make a great SEO plugin for me. It’s less than you might think.

The Guidelines

First, there are no silver bullets when it comes to SEO. NONE! SEO is a matter of understanding the online world and your place in it. It’s a matter of establishing value and authority for the topics you want to be known for. It’s not about keywords as much as it’s about topics. Then comes preparation, execution, and measurement. SEO will not succeed or fail because of one tool. SEO is the sum of content, proper setup, techniques, votes from the community (think links, shares, etc), community interaction, and a few tools. I don’t care what tool you use, if you don’t understand this concept, then you should just forget about these plugins and focus on writing good content. Publishing good content without an SEO plugin can get you surprisingly far.

Next, theme choice matters a lot in deciding which SEO plugin – or if you should even use an SEO plugin. Some themes provide their own SEO tools and it’s possible for a plugin to compete with or mess with the benefits the theme provides. If you don’t know or don’t have the skills to find out what’s happening, visit the theme’s forums and ask.  It is important to get this right.

And it’s a good idea to have an SEO plan with a keyword to content map or at least some form of theme pyramid (See Brett Tabke’s post) in mind. Nothing can replace the value of planning. Evaluate, plan, execute, repeat. Do your homework. Uncover what you don’t know and learn it.

What makes a great SEO plugin?

Before I start remember this is what I want in an SEO plugin. You may want something different. Here’s what I’m looking for:

1. The plugin should allow me to control on-site elements that I can’t easily control without it – meta keywords and meta descriptions for example. An SEO plugin should make it easier and do it better than the theme if I’m going to use it. It can be difficult to make an SEO plugin function flawlessly because there are far too many possible combinations of plugins and themes and each with a stake in what goes into the wp_head () area.
2. I want it to create an XML sitemap for submission to Google and Bing/Yahoo!
3. I’d really like it if the plugin allows me to exclude content from being indexed using a checkbox system. This would ideally edit robots.txt. Example: show me a list of posts or pages and let me choose which ones I want excluded >> write the rule into robots.txt and update the XML sitemap. Even better if the plugin also displays the current settings for and allows me to control the robots META tag (NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET) settings for each post or page.
4. I want it to provide analytics, either it’s own, hooks into Google Analytics (or other), and gives me stats in a useful way right on the WordPress dashboard. What good is messing with SEO if you don’t have a way to measure success?
5. I want it to provide tools that allow me to see social media shares or at least provide a hooks into the common social media plugins that allow sharing especially AddThis and ShareThis.  Allow me to set it up and to report the metrics in my dashboard.
6. I absolutely want this SEO plugin to be accepted into the WordPress plugin repository. Passing this bar is important to me because it means that at least one person not associated with the plugin author has taken a look under the hood at how it functions, how well it plays with the core functionality of WordPress and if there are any security issues. It does not guarantee the plugin plays well with other plugins but if the reviewers see a possible conflict, they’re likely to give the plugin author a heads up.
7. I like to know the plugin author supports her/his product so I look to see if the support forum is active and in particular if the author has resolved outstanding issues. I take into account some of these authors created the plugins they offer free of charge, have full time jobs other than plugin creation and support. Still, evidence of the author’s activity is important.
8. I look to see how popular the SEO plugin is, keeping in mind that popularity (high number of downloads) doesn’t necessarily equate to a great plugin. It just means a lot of people downloaded it. But if the plugin has a fundamental flaw like a bad user interface, it’s not likely to earn a lot of downloads.
9. I use Jetpack which takes care of pushing my content out to social media channels that I like to use. If you don’t use Jetpack then another item would be a way to do this using the plugin.

That’s about it. I look to other tools to give me more in depth analytics and research. I don’t want that sort of resource load on my server. I just want enough control and information to help keep the ship going where I point it. The rest of what I want to do happens elsewhere.

The SEO Plugins

I’m not going to review the SEO plugins I found, at least not in this post. These are the plugins I found that seem worth a look. I’ve used All In One SEO Pack and am currently testing WordPress SEO by Yoast. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these or others. They are all available in the WordPress Plugin libary.