WordPress SEO revisited, ManageWP & SDT’s imminent redesign
disabled the blog for a bit, & just decided to resurrect it. well, here we are talking about SEO again. this time i’m reevaluating the usefulness of All in One SEO Pack (AIO SEO). so what’s the big deal? well, after doing much research & reconsidering the parameters of search engine requirements (esp. Google’s PANDA & more recent content “freshness” algorithm updates), i recognize that newest content is king, & the spiders are currently focused on aggregating smaller snippets of the latest information available – kinda like media bytes on CNN.
archived information embedded in web page text is still relevant from a legacy indexing perspective, but the meta information continues to have less impact than before.
granted, i’m definitely no SEO genius & also propose that 8/10 of others out there promoting themselves as such are simply fooling themselves plus (trying to fool) everyone else. realistically it’s such a complex system of rules & counter-rules that, for all intents & purposes, you might as well only have friendly engaging, informational copy on any page or post. forget the rest.
i was sold on AIO SEO as a blanket solution before, but now realize the importance of SEO plugin treatment of a website’s content structure as opposed to pure article relevancy. for instance, most of my client’s sites are informational, & lack a blog where new stories are regularly posted. thus, their content is mainly static except for occasional annual updates. AIO SEO is geared towards WordPress sites where a blog is the main (index) page. what that means is all of the posts receive higher priority than any static informational pages within the website’s structure.
TGFI.net’s SEO Plugin for WordPress is a useful alternative, as it address WordPress when functioning as a content management system (CMS) – typically how my customer sites are configured. this approach makes perfect sense, as many of AIO SEO’s options aren’t useful or applicable to static themed sites. am presently testing it out on SDT, & may report back with some tangible results soon.
then there’s the keyword analysis component – something i’ve been paying more attention to lately. some paid SEO plugins like Easy WP SEO & SEOpressor claim to boost your SERP placement by like 30-40 percent overnight. i highly doubt the validity of these statements, but that’s pretty much web marketing in a nutshell overall. SERP (search engine results page) rankings mean how high your site places on results pages in Google, Yahoo! Bing, etc. so, these plugins analyze your individual on-page SEO & attempt to give key term advice designed to help improve your positioning in said results.
honestly don’t know if i’d pay for something like this without first getting some real-world feedback from other webmasters first. ironically, such info is hard to find anywhere other than on IT forums. every blogging site review or roundup i’ve seen reads like an advertorial for the products themselves. there is a free plugin i ran across called SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 which does the same thing, but in a slightly different format…definitely worth checking into.
additionally, i’ve been researching multiple WordPress install management solutions as my clientele upgrade process is fast becoming cumbersome for platform version releases & plugin updates. ManageWP is particularly intriguing, as it offers a free option for up to three sites. looks like a pretty cool admin interface too – guess we’ll find out as i just registered for a trial run.
lastly, SDT is finally getting a facelift – i started working on a new header about 2-3 weeks ago & also have new layout comps in progress. hopefully the revised version will be live by New Year’s. keep your eyes peeled for an announcement here.
thanks for reading & happy holidays!