What is a better solution of doing SEO for WordPress than using a dedicated plugin?
What is a better solution of doing SEO for WordPress than using a dedicated plugin?
http://olivianbreda.com/seo-wordpress-plugin/
The WordPress plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast is considered the best SEO plugin for WordPress and is currently the most popular one.
So, we have the CMS with the biggest number of users (WordPress) and the most popular plugin for doing SEO on it – Active Installs: 1+ Million.
My question is the following – is there a problem with using the plugin and is it possible to achieve the same results as the plugin provides by manually coding things?
What the plugin does?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
What does it do very well?
– XML sitemap notification.
– Not indexed notification.
– … perhaps other things?
What’s misleading about the plugin?
Focus keyword
http://www.matteoduo.com/focus-keyword-wordpress-seo/
http://olivianbreda.com/keywords-web-site/
Stopwords in URL / title.
What’s the problem and how do you identify it?
Keywords meta tag – Overuse.
Linkbuilding – Overuse.
Unique content – Overuse.
The plugin tends to look a lot like bloatware, in my opinion.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
Do other plugins have it, also?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
You need alternatives for:
Open Graph – og:title, og:image, og:description, the rest
http://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-to-add-open-graph-tags-to-wordpress
Test with:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
Twitter Social Graph:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-twitter-cards-in-wordpress/
Google+ rel=publisher:
http://moveableonline.com/blog/2014/04/01/implement-google-publisher-markup-website/
Meta description, meta title
https://perishablepress.com/how-to-generate-perfect-wordpress-title-tags-without-a-plugin/
http://xenero.com.au/adding-the-blog-description-to-a-wordpress-site/
http://www.kohactive.com/blog/wordpres-hacks-using-post-excerpts-as-meta-descriptions
Sitemap.xml
https://wordpress.org/plugins/xml-sitemaps/
Google Webmaster Tools & Bing & Alexa
There are solutions to manually verify the web site
Canonical URLs
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2013/06/add-canonical-urls-wordpress-blogs/
Noindex for categories & archives pages
Should you do it?
Yes, noindex: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/no-indexing-wordpress-taxonomies-do-or-dont/49508/
No, avoid noindex: http://www.wpoye.com/should-we-use-no-index-on-category-and-tags-pages-in-wordpress/
If you decide to do it:
http://www.systutorials.com/777/use-noindex-meta-tag-in-wordpress-to-prevent-search-engine-indexing-categories-tags-and-archives/
Schema.org
Hardcodong, or data highlighter:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/data-highlighter?hl=en&siteUrl=http://yoursite.com/
, or dedicated plugin:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/
, or plain ignore it.
Some conclusions?
– If you use the plugin, be informed, and verify the output (the result in code) and data usage.
– You don’t need most of the things the plugin does. See the video for details on what I use.
– If you code things yourself, you will be forced to learn some things about SEO.
Improvements for the future:
– Remove special characters from description.
– Force cut the description do desired size.
– If more than one image can be chosen from a single blog post, for og:image, pick the image with the best dimensions for social media.
– Manually edit the meta description for each blog post.
– Use a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyper-cache/ (small & tiny)
– Get links!
Details:
http://olivianbreda.com/seo-wordpress-plugin/