For my WordPressier projects I used to use plugins for the following:
- XML Sitemap
- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Verification via metatags
- Dofollow Comments
Then the Wolf and I would hack the code to switch out Category structure .com/category/category-name/ & 301 all the RSS feed links that are created for every page on a WordPress site.
So when I was struggling with my Summer of 210,000 Words project in Summer 2011 after Panda (or the deep crawl after it) nailed it, I was asking some SEO buddies their thoughts on how to fix it. During the talks, my hero/ mentor Douglas Karl of DK New Media & The Marketing Tech Blog showed me the Yoast SEO Plugin. He liked how well it was written and that the 1 plugin did the work of so many others.
I talked to others and a good chunk of the internet marketers up here in the region use it well. Kristin Page Longacre & Dave Woodson I’m pretty sure uses it. SEO legend Allyn Hane, the Lawn Care Nut I believe does so as well.
XML Sitemap – Yoast segments the XML Sitemaps, using the top layer sitemap_index.xml to partition the following sitemaps:
- post-sitemap.xml
- page-sitemap.xml
- slide-sitemap.xml (depending on your JS slider)
- category-sitemap.xml
- post_tag-sitemap.xm
Google Webmaster Verification – Google, Bing & Yahoo!
Category Structure – the Yoast SEO Plugin will strip out the /category/ layer
NoIndex on RSS Feeds – they’ll still exist, but the feed pages won’t get indexed
Metadata Writing & Analysis
The Yoast SEO Plugin will also provides its own Metadata writing – Title, Description, Keywords w/ an SEO analysis to let you know if your source keywords show up in the right spot.
The Yoast SEO Plugin will also help with breadcrumbs, headers, pagination, nofollowing comment links, admin and other various links… It’ll even help you with your robots.txt & .htaccess if you’d like – though I’m still a fan of manually making the robots.txt file (nothing personal).
Yoast also makes a damned good Google Analytics plugin that helps with the Google Analytics premium by performing asynchronous tracking so it loads quicker, tracks data more accurately and skirts the previous issue of when the old GA javascript code wouldn’t load (lose about 10-13% if our data at the old agency was correct).
But What About Transferring all that Metadata?
Yes, for those who have their Metadata writing in the All-in-One plugin or in a template like Thesis or StudioPress, Yoast created the SEO Data Transporter plugin to help transfer from one format to another so you can upload the data to Yoast and if you don’t like it, swap it back out. NOTE: REMEMBER TO HIGHLIGHT THE ENABLE KEYWORDS SECTION or the meta keywords won’t transfer over. That’s a copy & paste nightmare!
That’s why I use Yoast SEO Plugins.
Whatchall think?
Also does a great job of providing the opengraph and itemprop data that Facebook and Google+ scrape when grabbing your blog’s previews 🙂
Also does a great job of providing the opengraph and itemprop data that Facebook and Google+ scrape when grabbing your blog’s previews 🙂
Does that include FB commenting? Getting ready to switch and I haven’t looked for the plugin
It’s very helpful information that you share over here. I wanna thank you for sharing this.
It’s very helpful information that you share over here. I wanna thank you for sharing this.