X SEO

by Chris Warden

This is yet another topic within this guide that could be a
book all on its own. When marketing your site and attempting to improve your
rankings you need to have an avenue to track what’s working and where you
should spend your time.

The easiest way to start tracking site activity is with
Google Analytics.

Setting up an account is as simple as filling out a couple
of forms and providing Google with the URL for your site. Once you complete the
sign-up, Google provides you with a tracking code that goes into the header
file on your website. If you’re using WordPress, you can install a plugin that
inserts the code for you by just using 
your Analytics ID, which looks like:

UA-123456789-10

So, on WordPress you’d simply install the plugin, and then
place that code within the settings area and click Save. The plugin does the rest.

If you aren’t using WordPress, you’ll need to find the
header code of the website, and insert the Analytics code before the closing
</head> tag.

Analytics allows us to see key site metrics such as total
number of visitors, page views, time on site, and where the traffic is coming
from. As I said previously, Analytics could be a book (or several books) all on
its own, so this overview is going to be pretty basic. That said, here are some
of the key metrics you should be looking at:

Traffic sources:
Allowing you to see where the traffic is coming from, how much time they’re
spending on your site, the bounce rate (when they see one page and leave) and
repeat visits, the traffic sources data allows you to see if the places you are
spending your time and marketing money are paying off.

Organic traffic:
See what keywords you are ranking for. If you’re already ranking for certain
keywords, you can start editing the landing pages for the query. For example,
if people are finding your site by searching “San Diego Sushi” and landing on a
blog page, maybe you edit that page to show them sushi specials, coupons, and
photos of your food. This goes back to the idea of giving your customer what
they want.

Time on site: For
a local business page, you don’t want people spending a lot of time on your
site or searching every page. These are valuable insights into the optimization
of your page, and they show that you might not be making the information they
need easily accessible. On the same note, an average time on site of 3 seconds
means the user is seeing something they don’t like and leaving immediately.

Additional steps:
If you are particularly data driven, you should look into adding conversion
tracking or funnels to your site. Adding these to your site allow you to see if
your traffic is converting, meaning performing a desired action on your website
(using the contact form, clicking a link to call you, etc.). That’s quite a
process, so I’ll leave you to Google that on your own if it interests you.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

With over 850,000 views on Slideshare in just 2 days, this 2013 Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker & Liang Wu from KPCB is a must read. There are over 2.4 billion internet users world-wide and huge opportunities in store. This report speaks to the state of content (including photos, video and audio) and how it is increasingly findable, shared and tagged. Digital content is created and shared 9 times more now than 5 years ago. Mobile use is expanding at a dramatic rate and implications for smartphones, tablets and even wearable devices are explored.

In Other Online Marketing News…

Google blimps will bring the web to Africa. Search giant Google is intending to build huge wireless networks across Africa and Asia, using high-altitude balloons and blimps. The company is intending to finance, build and help operate networks from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, with the aim of connecting around a billion people to the web. Wired UK.

The Social Imperative for CEOs. A new study from KRC Research has found that 76% of executives think it is a good idea for CEOs to be social. The benefits of the Chief Social Evangelist role has many benefits ranging from boosting company reputation to impacting business performance. (Inlcudes a report, video and infographic). Weber Shandwick.

WordPress Turns 10. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg reflected on the 10th birthday of his baby that now powers over 70 million websites and WordPress has grown to be the largest CMS in the world, powering an astounding 18% of the web. Happy Birthday WordPress! Mashable, WordPress.

Consumers Want A Mobile-Optimized Web.  A survey by Kentico Digital reports that 85% of smartphone owners use their phones to compare info before making a purchase. 75% of smartphone and tablet owners say the look and feel of a company’s mobile Web site plays into their purchase decision. When it comes to Web sites that aren’t mobile-optimized, 44% of tablet and smartphone users said they’ll never return to the site. MediaPost.

Twitter bumps lists from 20 to 1,000. Each of those 1,000 accounts can have up to 5,000 Twitter accounts listed.  The Next Web.

Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome. According to Danny Sullivan, the conversational search feature demonstrated at the Google I/O conference has natural language, semantic search and more built into it.  Search Engine Land.

Only 37% of Marketers Think Their Facebook Advertising Is Effective. Citing the recent 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner, 92% of marketers surveyed use Facebook in their marketing mix, but less than 40% are satisfied. ClickZ.

Under pressure, Facebook targets sexist hate speech. Under mounting pressure from activists and advertisers, Facebook is ramping up efforts to stamp out hate speech, particularly depictions of violence against women. The move, announced Tuesday, came after a weeklong campaign by women’s groups targeting pages that celebrated or made light of rape, domestic violence and sexual degradation of women. CNN.

Gmail Updates the Inbox with Tabs. Tabs will appear at the top of the Gmail inbox where users can select personalized categories like Social, Promotions, Updates, and Primary. The new inbox is rolling out gradually. The desktop, Android and iOS versions will become available within the next few weeks.  Official Gmail Blog.

TopRank Community Comments

Yesterday’s The Truth About Content Marketing & SEO post struck a chord amongst some impressively credible marketers, who took the time to respond:

Robert Rose says: ”Here here…. Excellent post…. This is a constant battle these days as SEO remains so important, yet is changing so fundamentally. As I often tell clients – you can be a content production factory – and your content will do nothing but settle bar bets. Or, you can be remarkable, and perhaps reach fewer people. And as you point out, it’s not a zero sum game – and it’s the balanced approach that will ultimately win. Kudos my friend.”

Bernie Borges says: “Well said Lee….The truth is (as you say) that as content marketing has become mainstream, some brands are flying by the seat of their pants without regard for best practices. If they experience poor results, they’re the first ones to say, it doesn’t work.”

John Ellis says: “One of the biggest myths propagated by the SEO world’s definition of content marketing is that it simply means creating more content. Great statement +Lee Odden. Content without SEO is a waste. More content with out purpose or intent is also a waste. Extremes are typical in this industry. Go after the latest shiny object seo tactic without applying any actual SEO with the tactic. SEO is not a tool, not software, not marketing. It is a process.. plain and simple. A process that is applied to everything we do on the web. The skill that most do not understand is the natural application of the SEO process to our content and engagement around that content. Content Marketing is not a “subset” of SEO either. No it is not. Great article.”

TopRank in the News

Optimize was named one of the “5 Must Read Marketing Books for Small Business” by Intuit along with Content Rules by my friends Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman and The Rules of PR and Marketing by David Meermand Scott. Optimize is in great company!

My long time pal John Jantsch did a podcast interview with me on The Future of SEO (plus a good bit on what content marketing really means) over at the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. |
Online Marketing News: Google Blimps, Social CEOs, WordPress Turns 10, Future of Internet 2.4 Billion Strong | http://www.toprankblog.com

About a week ago, we “migrated” Yoast.com to Genesis 2.0, in the process we switched to their new HTML5 / Schema.org code and we slightly updated our design, making the header shorter and making improvements to our responsive design. This was a bit of work, but not even half as much as that sounds like and that is due entirely to the fact that Genesis 2.0, and especially it’s schema.org functionality, rocks. Let me elaborate.

Why implement Schema.org markup?

Let me start with explaining why you should be bothered with schema.org if you weren’t convinced yet. Not just Google uses schema.org, all 4 major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Yandex use it for several different purposes. Yandex recently started doing something that’s way cooler than Google’s rich snippets, you should check that out. But it’s not just them. Recently, Pinterest joined the party by announcing support for Product, Recipe and Movie schema’s through their Rich Pins effort.

So, in my opinion, schema.org markup is a must for everyone serious about their websites optimization.

General service warning: what follows is rather geeky. If you’re not a developer but you do use Genesis or are considering it, feel free to forward this to your developer.

Schema.org enhancements

This site runs a custom Genesis child theme. Most of the CSS and Genesis work for that was done by the awesome Bill Erickson, but I took quite some time after he’d finished to add in all sorts of schema.org goodness to pages. I want my site to be a living example of what is possible from a rich snippets perspective in the SERPs and I use it to experiment with things all the time.

We have a few different post types here on Yoast, which each have their own Schema.org counterpart. Take, for instance, my speaking page. I have a post type for speaking events, and the speaking page is actually the post type archive for that post type. If you test that page with the Structured Data Testing Tool Google provides, you’ll see it’s marked up with cool Event schema’s, which will show up in the search results too:

There are various ways you could reach this with Genesis, I do it by creating a file, archive-speaking_event.php, where “speaking_event” is the name of the post type. Basically, to get this file to display the post type archive, all it needs to have is the following code:

genesis();

But in our case, we want to do a bit more. We need to mark up each individual post as an Event type and link them to the appropriate URLs for the individual events. Also, there’s all sorts of output that we’ll need to gather, like dates, location names, addresses and countries. Let’s start with the easy bits:

Changing the Schema type of an entries output

First of all, add this file to your child theme by including it from your functions.php. If you simply add it to the same directory it’s as simple as adding this to the end of that file:

require('genesis-schema-helper-functions.php');

That file contains helper functions we’ll need to do all the work. Now remember, this used to take all sorts of extra divs to do well or you were required to rewire the base framework. With Genesis 2.0 though, it’s as simple as adding this before the genesis() call:

add_filter( 'genesis_attr_entry', 'yoast_schema_event', 20 );
add_filter( 'genesis_attr_entry-title', 'yoast_itemprop_name', 20 );
add_filter( 'genesis_attr_entry-content', 'yoast_itemprop_description', 20 );
add_filter( 'genesis_post_title_output', 'yoast_title_link_schema', 20 );
add_filter( 'genesis_attr_content', 'yoast_schema_empty', 20 );

This does the following:

• turn the schema type of each individual entry on the page into an event;
• replace the normal “headline” itemprop for the entry title with “name”, as required by this specific schema;
• change the itemprop of the entry content to “description”, instead of “text”, which is the default for a blog post;
• make sure the link in the headline has the itemprop=”url” needed;
• remove the overall schema.org type of the page as that would confuse the search engine.

The basic work is now done, of course we need all the meta data, and we’ll need to retrieve that in the conventional way. The code I used for that can be found in the gist I created for this file.

This bit of work replaced hundreds of lines of ugly code with easily readable and easily applicable code which as a bonus actually has less of a need for extra divs etc in the output. I absolutely love it. If you want to see more examples of pages on this site with cool Schema markup, check these:

• my Genesis review, which itself has beautiful review markup, as you can see here.
• my plugin pages, for instance my WordPress SEO plugin page, which has product + review markup, see here.
• this, or any other post, which has the default Genesis 2.0 blogposting markup.

Genesis 2.0 is still in beta, and I’ve been discussing several possible changes with Nathan Rice, Genesis’ Lead Developer, that would make some of this work even easier. This is where the future lies though: more and better markup for pages with a theme that allows you to easily add the metadata you need. I’m considering adding some Genesis specific functionality to WordPress SEO to make all this even easier, I’d love to know your thoughts and what you’d like to do with all this.

Schema.org & Genesis 2.0 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Ten years ago today, WordPress, the open source blogging software, was born. It’s amazing to think that it’s been that long, but considering it had all of the elements that other startups and projects have tried to emulate over the past 10 years, then it makes sense.

When speaking with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, you’d think that he was only a small part of the movement that attempted to empower anyone and everyone to self-publish. While that might be partially true, Mullenweg has taken all of his learnings over the years and poured them into the for-profit arm, Automattic.

The project started as a form of the blogging platform b2/cafelog, and the name itself, WordPress, wasn’t even Mullenweg’s idea. It came from a friend of his. It was essential for WordPress to be open source, as Mullenweg explained to me last month: “When I first got into technology I didn’t really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software I realized how important this would be.”

By allowing an infinite number of developers to collaborate on a platform, WordPress had the best chance of its peers to reach critical mass. Only developers knew what the hurdles were to setting up their own publishing platform. The competitors had their own idea of what those hurdles were, therefore putting themselves at an immediate disadvantage. It was a numbers game, community vs. corporate. WordPress has won, with more than 18 million downloads of its latest version, 3.5. The WordPress formula, when it comes to community, has been copied, but never replicated.

Mullenweg told me that early meetups were the key to finding the passionate individuals that would push WordPress to where it is today: “Technology is best when it brings people together.”

Writing is one of the hardest things to do.

Most people don’t consider themselves to be writers because they simply don’t know what to say. Mullenweg felt that for people like that, giving them a platform that was easy to set up and use would allow them to spend more time on the important parts of writing. If writing is one of the hardest things to do, as Mullenweg says, then figuring out how to publish your thoughts shouldn’t be.

The power of community, especially for developers, is best thought of as a group of like-minded people working towards a similar goal. The people that work on WordPress are problem solvers, they’re people who like to make things easier for themselves and for others. Those types of people are special, and WordPress was able to capture the best of the best. Some have even moved on to paying jobs at Automattic.

Mullenweg tells me that one of his main early contributors, Ryan Boren, used to say: “Just code. It’s just code. Anything that we want to do is just code. There’s nothing you can imagine that can’t be done.”

That type of mindset is paramount to the success of WordPress and every open source project since. Even when Mullenweg decided to turn WordPress into a business with Automattic in 2005, which has since raised $80.6 million, the community was not to be forgotten: “We figured out a business model that was complementary to the growth of the community.”

By leveraging all of the hard work of thousands of contributors, Mullenweg found a way to keep giving back. By keeping WordPress open source, which was key from day one, the business side of things hasn’t alienated those who continue to work on the code that’s available to all. In fact, much of the work that’s done by the community continues to make its way into the paid WordPress.com offerings.

Some of the WordPress community has found ways to create a career built off of the work that they’ve done. Whether they’re consulting, designing or implementing, the software itself has changed a lot of lives. Mullenweg tells me that while this is great, many of the open source contributors would still work on the platform even if they didn’t find a way to get paid. “They approach code like a craft, and not a job.” he says.

The passion from the WordPress community has not only brought people together, but their collective work now powers 17 percent of the top 1 million websites on the web. That couldn’t have been done by Mullenweg alone, and he knows that. That’s an obvious statement now, but the key is that he’s always known that.

The founder shared his thoughts about the anniversary in a blog post today, as if the software itself was his child:

You’re so beautiful… I’m continually amazed and delighted by how you’ve grown. Your awkward years are behind you. Best of all, through it all, you’ve stuck with the principles that got you started in the first place. You’re always changing but that never changes. You’re unafraid to try new things that may seem wacky or unpopular at first.

He wasn’t writing to the code, he was writing to the people behind it.

[Photo credits: Flickr, Flickr and Flickr]

Our WordPress SEO plugin has been getting more and more downloads, bringing it to the top of the most downloaded plugin chart on WordPress.org fairly regularly. With that comes more interest from other developers as well, which is something we absolutely love, but is kind of impossible to manage properly on WordPress.org. Which is why we’ve now decided to fully move to Github.

New developer

Recently there were some unfortunate events in the US which caused BlueGlass, a company lots of my friends worked at, to go bust. As with all negatives, there was a good thing that came out of this, as I was able to hire Linh Pham, one of their incredible developers. He’s now come on board full time as a remote worker to fix bugs and develop new functionality across all our free and premium plugins. You’ll probably see him on github if you decide to become active there.

Roadmap

I have many, many ideas for WordPress SEO. I’m slowly speccing these ideas as Issues in github, where you will currently find an 1.6 milestone and a 2.0 milestone. WordPress SEO 1.6 will contain a lot of bugfixes and some smaller enhancements, combined with one bigger new feature: a wpseo_sitemap shortcode that generates an HTML sitemap.

The 2.0 branch already contains a first stab at Google Webmaster Tools integration, allowing for:

• Easy website verification.
• Verified submission of the XML index sitemap.
• Retrieval of crawl errors.

I’m very excited about the potential of that new feature.

Internationalization

This is probably a good time to remind you that if you want to become active in the internationalization of the WordPress SEO plugin, we have a fully functioning GlotPress install on translate.yoast.com. You can register here if you want to help translate. The internationalization for all our plugins, both free and premium is managed by the awesome Remkus de Vries. We currently have 382 registered translators, of which more than half have actually been active in translating, but we can always use more active translators.

As a thank you, for our premium plugins you can get a free single license of a plugin if you translate the plugin into a new language.

Patches welcome!

I have taken the freedom to look at how the Easy Digital Downloads github community is set up and basically copied, pasted and modified some of what they did, resulting in most notably our new contribution guide. But what I really want to say is, we really welcome your pull requests!

I’m very excited about this change and hope it means more people will dive in and help us improve what’s already the most advanced WordPress SEO plugin available today!

WordPress SEO Community & Roadmap is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

On this day, 4 years ago, I started full time with Automattic. This is my 4th Automattiversary.

I had already been on trial for 5 months by that point (since January), and had a good feel for the company and the other Automatticians. I knew it was where I wanted to be. So I accepted the offer, and became a fully-fledged member of a relatively small team (I was employee number 35) that was bringing blogging to the people (amongst other things).

In the four years since then, a lot has happened and changed.

One of the most obvious things is that the company went from this (taken at my first full-company meetup, in Quebec, Canada)…

…to this (most recent full-company meetup in San Diego, California, although we’re significantly bigger already, I think 160-something people):

But so much more has happened. Let’s see:

• We went from a completely flat company structure to a new team-based arrangement to help us cope with growing, and being completely distributed. Each team operates like a small company of its own (with design/development etc), and then there are a few teams that do cross-product things like Happiness, Operations and Systems.
• I went from working almost exclusively on IntenseDebate, to working extensively on Gravatar, to working on a variety of “social” features for WordPress.com, to now leading the development of our internal communications platform.
• We had, and then lost (long story) a beautiful office space on Pier 38 in San Francisco
• I have travelled. A lot. By my count: Los Angeles (3 times), Manila, Washington D.C., Quebec, Sunnyvale, New York (twice), Jakarta, Austin (three times), Portland (twice), Savannah, Seaside, Athens, Minneapolis, Orange County, Seattle, Lisbon, Budapest, Kailua, Napa, Boston, San Diego (twice), Berlin, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Columbia, and Akron/Canton. Phew!
• On top of that, I made the most of the fact that we can work from anywhere in the world and spent 45 days in South America (Santiago, Chile mostly, and a few days in Buenos Aires for good measure), around 45 days in Australia (South Western Australia, Perth and Sydney), and then relocated from San Francisco to Brooklyn, New York.
• Now we have a new, amazing (huge) space in San Francisco, which I’ll finally get to see in a few days when I’m back in the Bay Area again.
• I am now the only remaining original member of Team Social (one left Automattic and is now writing a book about us, the others have switched to different teams/roles), and am now the Team Lead.
• I’ve spoken at a bunch of WordCamps, some WordPress Meetups and our VIP Workshop.
• We’ve continued to hire an amazing group of people from all over the world, while only a few have chose to leave the company.
• VaultPress came into existence, and has redefined what security and backups mean for WordPress sites. We also acquired a related company.
• Speaking of acquisitions, we also acquired Simperium, and their main product Simplenote.

I’m sure there’s so much more, but it’s hard to keep up with all the things going on these days. I hadn’t even realized until just now, but this is also the longest I’ve ever worked at one company; even though in some ways it feels like I’ve worked for a few different ones because I’ve done such different things along the way.

Here’s to at least another 4 years with the best company, made up of the best people, that I’ve ever worked with.

Me skydiving in San Diego, during a work trip

Last month, I gave readers some tips on measuring engagement using Google Analytics and WordPress. This month, I want to dig deeper into how you can use content scroll depth to help craft a strategy for your future content curating efforts. Creating a website that attracts visitors via search…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

10 years ago today, I posted my first blog post on this site. That’s pretty much forever on the internet, and I think it probably also makes me old. A lot has changed in the last decade, both on this website, and for me personally (and the world at large). Let’s have a quick look shall we?

dentedreality.com.au

When I first created this website, I was using a little tool called blosxom to manage the blog. It was a tiny little Perl script that pulled the contents of your blog from text files on your filesystem. Pretty awesome, nerdy stuff. Dented Reality also looked something like this, pretty hot huh?

Lots and lots of hand-coding. I was really into Information Architecture and search systems and stuff like that, so my site kind of reflected that. It had a fluid layout and scaled reasonably well to the screens of the day. I’m surprised (and pleased) to see that the version in archive.org even mostly loads and works in a modern browser. My site stayed looking like that for a LONG time. I poked around a bit with the content, and posted on the blog here and there, but wasn’t really that into the whole file-system-based blog thing (as neat an idea as it was, it just didn’t fit wonderfully with how I worked).

Somewhere between Oct 18 and Dec 13 in 2008, I finally launched a complete overhaul of my site, which was then powered by WordPress.

I started blogging more, and even posted about the site update itself. This was a (my first) handmade WordPress theme, and included a few neat things like the combined feed on the right (music from last.fm, tweets and links from delicious), some dynamic page menus and loading posts based on tags onto the project pages.

A lot has changed since then… except for the theme It really must be time for a new one, and it happens that I’m currently working on a new theme that will eventually power this site. It’s just not quite ready for prime time yet. Under the hood, a bunch of plugins have come and gone, and this site has even been merged into a multi-site install that’s used to power a few other WordPress’ that I manage. On the surface though, Dented Reality looks pretty similar to how it did almost 5 years ago. I promise I’ll get my new theme launched before I hit the 5 year mark (and it’s a significantly different theme)!

At a hosting level, dentedreality.com.au has been hosted at phpwebhosting.com, DreamHost and now MediaTemple over that time. I think that’s all. I’m pretty happy with MediaTemple for now, their Dedicated Virtual plan is serving this site (and a bunch of others) just fine. In keeping with the short-attention-span culture, I also got my hands on http://dntd.cc which redirects to this site at the root level, and functions as a URL-shortener for all entries on this site as well (it’s also really handy to have a one-letter email address on for when you have to hand-write one somewhere).

Life

While my site was ticking away, a bunch of big changes have happened in my life as well (some more related to this website than others).

1. Left my “motherland”, Australia, and moved to Maui, Hawaii. I was there for a year and knew that it wasn’t the place for me.
2. Moved from Hawaii to San Francisco, California (some time in the months leading up to this). Absolutely loved living in SF and really got involved in the tech community, met a lot of great people and really built out my career.
3. Became much more involved with WordPress and in 2009, started working for Automattic, the company that owns/operates WordPress.com (and a bunch of other products/services).
4. Met Erika.
5. Moved from SF to Brooklyn, New York (with Erika), where we are right now.

Through my work at Automattic, I now spend most days working on something at least tangentially-WordPress related. It’s pretty awesome, and seems fitting that this site continues to run on WordPress (I self-host, rather than run on WordPress.com). I still experiment and try out new things here (and run “trunk”), and as mentioned I’m hoping to soon launch a pretty major overhaul of the site, which will include a new theme and a bunch of new content. As for some other things I’ve been up to online in that time:

• 9,809 tweets on Twitter
• 3,974 photos on Flickr
• 1,481 links on Delicious

and a bunch comments, posts, images, etc around the place. That’s a lot of digital stuff. You’ll be seeing a lot more of that around here once I get the updates in place.

I wonder what the next decade will hold?

I find myself becoming more and more defensive of WordPress SEO plugins, my own in particular. When people make jokes about them I tend to get angry, which is perhaps a stupid reaction, but it made me think: why would people make jokes about them, are they that stupid? What does the future hold for those plugins and what do they really do?

So I went and installed and played with a ton of SEO plugins. My conclusion: hardly any of the new ones are original or truly add value, but they all promise heaven. The more well known free SEO plugins, including my own, have mostly overlapping feature sets, with some of them having features that others lack completely, and code quality varying highly. Some WordPress hosting companies complain about SEO plugins in general, having seen quite a few of them now I understand at least where they got the idea that SEO plugins are slow. I guess the burden is on me to show that my WordPress SEO plugin doesn’t suffer from that slowness.

Luckily, I know some hosts make people move over from other plugins to mine, and I know for a fact that this migration guide on my blog is highly visited because people get complaints from their host about All in One SEO using too much resources and wanting them to move to my WordPress SEO plugin. Some other people still swear by AIOSEO though, which is, of course, fine: to each his own.

Squirrly

I was truly in shock when I saw some of the newer kids on the block though. Squirrly, notably, posted about the best WordPress SEO plugins two days back and wrote:

It should, first of all, be all white-hat and be up to date with the updates that came up post Panda and Penguin (Yoast and SeoPressor for example, are outdated from this point of view).

That’s quite a bold statement to make. When I asked them on Twitter to back up their statement, as it’s close to libel in my opinion, they didn’t really come up with a suitable answer, instead referring to my page analysis functionality recommending 300 words whereas “only 80 where necessary for Google News”.

It’s obvious what the difference is between me and them, just from that statement alone: I don’t just read Google’s guidelines, I actually optimize content and I know that you need a certain bit of content in a post to be able to rank well, even in Google news. How I know? Well I’ve worked with some of the biggest newspapers in the world to optimize their content, in fact, I’m currently working on a project for the Guardian involving a lot of Google news optimization. When asked, they couldn’t tell me what they are basing their analytics on, instead answering me with this:

@yoast SEOs usually don’t agree. to this, I hope you can agree

— Squirrly SEO Plugin (@SquirrlyHQ) April 6, 2013

But… Of course, I had to look at their plugin. Seems they’ve built a snippet preview (how original, it’s not like I didn’t add that to my SEO plugin like 2 years ago):

It doesn’t even match the look of Google’s search results even in how it looks, second, it doesn’t highlight the target keyword, which they make you put in. Funnily enough, they then do a kind of analysis on your content that looks remarkably similar to what my WordPress SEO plugin does:

The difference between that plugin and mine is that they do this “live”, which is something I’ve been pondering for a while, but the way they do it is by sending all of your data to their server all the time. Now, if they did something on their server that added value, that’d be cool, but they don’t. And after 14 days of doing this for you, they make you pay for the pleasure of doing this. Now you can get the same kind of analysis, for free, by using my WordPress SEO plugin. As far as I know, only Copyblogger’s Scribe actually adds value in what they do by sending stuff to their server, this, on the other hand, is pure nonsense.

The plugin also adds an XML sitemap. Funnily enough, you’d think that if they want to sell something they’d at least have feature parity with what the free plugins do. But their XML sitemap doesn’t even contain custom post types, nor does it support images in the XML sitemap, both standard features in my plugin.

Lastly, they offer the option to add a favicon and apple icon (remember this free plugin? you might not, it’s 5 years old).

All in all, they’re trying to use a funny looking squirrel to sell something that not just my SEO plugin but several other free WordPress SEO plugins can do for you and do better. The most shocking thing? They’ve actually gotten funding, which shows you that some people will fund anything without doing research.

This is obviously not the future, so what is?

I have a whole lot of features planned for my SEO plugin, some of which I plan to add to the free core plugin, some of which will probably be more niche and I will therefore make into premium extensions, like my Video SEO and Local SEO plugins.

Scribe has been taking great steps and been adding more and more features that actually help people optimize their content properly. SEO Ultimate has some features I think people will like a lot, and though I’d implement them differently, I very much welcome competition like that: it forces all of us to move forward.

I’m looking forward to making it easier to optimize websites technically and to optimize content, as well as keep up with all the new things Google, Bing and other search engines put out there. The future of SEO is in integrating it more into all the other stuff we do, that’s exactly what my plugin aims to do.

Would love to here what you think should be in the future of SEO plugins!

The future of SEO plugins for WordPress is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

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