I thought it was strange to come across this question from a reader, but I’ll answer it. They asked, “How do you feel about SEO plugins for WordPress?”
The fact that I’ve worked in the past for Yoast, who created the Yoast SEO plugin, which is used by millions of websites around the world, has nothing to do with my response.
My feelings about SEO plugins are that they are really handy for the regular Joe and Jane out there needing a little help. It’s not a tool to automatically get your website listed on the first page of Google, or ranked number 1. It’s a guide to help you optimize your content and overall website to be seen more favorably by Google.
Just installing it won’t do. You have to do more. You have to configure the plugin. You also need to make sure to have quality content that is also unique. There’s a lot of basic things your website needs aside from just installing an SEO plugin.
If you’re putting all your eggs in the SEO plugin basket, you’re only fooling yourself. At the very least, you need to educate yourself on basic SEO, and even basic SEO for WordPress. AND, if you’re a local business, learning a little on local SEO would help you.
Plugins like Yoast SEO have a great content analysis tool to help you optimize your individual posts and pages. However, it doesn’t educate you on things like making an enticing meta description or an enticing title. While it’s a basic blog tip to make enticing or engaging post titles, not a lot of people are really aware that they can cleverly utilize the meta description as a call to action.
My feelings with SEO plugins are that you should use them, but shouldn’t get so wrapped up into it that you over-optimize and make your content look awkward and lifeless to the reader. Remember, after you’ve published that post or page, Google may index your article, but you’re not the only one that may read it… or suffer through reading it. Use your common sense when writing.
Honestly, there are times that I don’t even insert a focus keyword into my Yoast SEO metabox. I edit the title, meta description, and add my social network images. For me, I love these tools, and find them the most useful. I’ve configured my Yoast SEO plugin years ago, and have been writing for a long time. For you, it might be other things because of your familiarity with SEO, blogging, or experience with the SEO plugin.
What are your thoughts on SEO plugins? What SEO plugin do you use? What are your favorite features of SEO plugins?
I still am trying to figure out SEO. I try to use keywords that I think are helpful, but I can never really tell.
Hello Neil,
I’m using Yoast SEO plugin for a long time in all of my blog. It’s really a cool plugin that help me to optimize my blog content easily and also help me to rank individual contents on Google quickly.
Hi Nile,
Excellent Post Once again,
Well i am using SEO By Yoast Plugin on my blog for last 3 years and i am pretty much satisfied with its results. Most of us are think that Yoast plugin comes up with magic. It can only work well if our content is qualitative and 100 % unique, and we use keywords in our content preciously. In URL, Title, Headings, Description and images as well.
Thanks for fantastic share 🙂
Regards
Mairaj
Hey Nile,
For me SEO plugins is not only a plugin but a guide through which I can understand my mistakes and limits.
It is nice to here from you about your views about your SEO plugins.
Thanks for this article
I love the Yoast SEO plugin. I actually switched from All in One SEO Pack to Yoast SEO last year after hearing so many people rave about it. Like you, I don’t always insert a focus keyword into my metabox. But for the times when I do, it definitely helps me better optimize my content. For example, sometimes I’ll forget to give my image an SEO name, and the plugin will remind me to do that.
I think the only advantage of using these plugins, is that it’s easier not to forget some SEO details while you are writing. But everybody are using them now, so there are not much real advantage, everybody takes care of the very same things. The only thing that can make you more competitive and distinct is yourself and what you do apart from using those plugins.
How about disadvantages of using WordPress Plugins?
We are depending greatly on the plugin developers to provide updates
Thanks for Information about SEO Plugins . Your Article is impressive and very informative. I am now regular visitor of your website and bookmarked it.
Hi Nile
When I started my first website back in 2003, search engines weren’t half as clever as they are now. So there was a mood to (over) optimize the on-page SEO and even to auto-generate such hyper-optimized sites. The result was floods of spammy looking websites with hard to read content inappropriately stuffed with keywords. Thankfully those days are over and such auto-generated, keyword stuffed sites are history.
What I like about today’s WordPress SEO plugins (I also use Yoast) is that they offer search engine friendly guidance and analysis of each individual post’s content and meta information, nudging me to tighten up their focus and giving them a better chance of ranking for a main keyword. However, I believe that most of my organic search engine traffic instead comes from all kinds of long-tail keywords my content ranks for naturally.
One point of view about Yoast is that it may be too prescriptive leading to less naturally written content for those that aim for the ‘green light’ every time. But for me it’s this is a moot point, as I more often prefer to ignore, for example, optimizing for the density of a single keyword in favour of what I feel is helpful, well written quality content which will naturally attract better off-page SEO with more backlinks, social shares and ‘likes’ etc.
Kindest regards
~Matt
SEO plugins are used by many people today’s but Yoast SEO plugins are also good for using in all pack and his may bring all thing put inside keywords also some good important post about blogging will be there for better ranking website on search engines. Yoast SEO seen good for plugins but used rarely in markets what i had seen.
Regards
Rama Krishna
Yoast SEO is the best plugin ever! I’ve been using it more than 3 years, no cost, very helpfull.
Yoast SEO is a very common plugin in every blogs. I like to have SEO plugin in my dashboard because this gives me a accurate value of my mistakes and also gives value for the perfection.
Thanks for your article.
Without seo plugins wordpress is pretty much useless. Very sad that, by default, wordpress doesn’t provide essential tools and they must be downloaded afterwords.
Hello Nile,
Yoast SEO plugin is a must have plugin for the beginners so that they can track what they are doing and if any correction is needed or not. In case of experts, they don’t need such tools because they can have a idea what they have done and what needed to be done.
Thanks Nile for such a great post. Most of people prefer Yoast SEO Plugin. because it provides good guidance for beginners with great functionality.
really , I use often YOAST SEO because simply it’s the best wordpress plugin, and works good and all my websites got rankings FAST on search engines with good keywords.
Thanks for this amazing article.
Keep going 🙂
Hey Nile, love the blog post 🙂
I’d like to add that social signals are strong indicators and so we install plugins like SumoME on migrations of newbie blogs. This ensures they start getting engagement on their blogs which converts into higher rankings 🙂
Hello Nile,
If you are asking me about Plugins then I love to use plugins on blogs because these plugins makes our job easy to manage any blog, I am also little weak in coding so the plugins also do the job for me easily.
Yoast SEO, Genesis Simple Edits, XML sitemap etc are the plugins which I am using right now.
Thank You so much for this important discussion.
Some plugins just ease out our manual work and are good to identify the small things we missed out. But yes, too much plugins is like playing with the site navigation speed and hence resulting in negative page load speed.
Yes i agree with that a seo toole does not give automatically get your website listed on the first page of Google, or ranked number 1. It’s a guide to help you optimize your content and overall website to be seen more favorably by Google .
tool tell the quality of the content . if you are are doing proper seo then you can be on the first page of the google .
You have share good and interesting article .
Thanks for This .
Being an SEO myself, I find the use of tools a waste of both time and money with very rare exception. I think that the average blogger or business owner would be much better off paying for a tool like SEMRush or Majestic or what have you, SOLELY so that they can do backlink research on sites that are already ranking, and then go and copy said links.
Otherwise, SEO plugins, chrome extensions… They just overcomplicate ranking for most people. Killer content, killer backlinks, that’s it. Like I said, if you really need a tool, shell out for something legit, write your great copy that people are going to link to, and then go find those backlinks.
Big fan of yoast here, and i like you use it to edit the title, description and the pagination link, other than that i dont tend to look at the other metrics, and i have found my sites rank well by using this stratergy.
Hi Nile,
Yes i am also use Yoast SEO plugin and it is really helpful but only when if your content are pure and 100% unique then you can get top raking as well, and i also like yoast seo plugin really basic guide which make simple how to use title, meta tag, keywords
WordPress SEO plugins are one of the best thing for any website. I’m a big fan of Yoast SEO plugin. I’m a wordpress developer and believe me whenever a client asks me to install an SEO plugin I have installed Yoast SEO plugin. I like it because it makes our work more easy.
Hi Margesh! Definitely… it does make things a lot easier. 🙂
I guess i have been tricked in to this wordpress thing , i was told by my web guy that wordpress is much easier to use and you can do things quickly.
I think the other way around , its not plain and simple you need to know bit of coding to do this.
I use SEO plugin but “Content is King”
I am favouring, Yoast SEO is the best plugin ever! I’ve been using it more than 3 years, no cost, very helpfull.