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Do WordPress SEO Plugins Work?

December 28, 2012  |  Post by: chris

I often work with WordPress sites doing SEO. I recently had an opportunity to build a site for a friend, Crystal Anne Artwork. My friend is an artist and being that the site is essentially all pictures and no text, an interesting problem presented itself. Without any text to work with, how would I accomplish the SEO?

Crystal Anne Artwork

After some research, a WordPress SEO plugin seemed to present the answer. Having never used one before, though, I was initially skeptical. Nonetheless, I thought it had very little potential downside and a large potential upside. At worst I would waste the time and effort of installing it and setting all the keywords and such, and I weighed that small downside against the potential upside, a boost in rankings. In the end, I decided it was an easy choice and that I would go ahead and install one.

There are a number of different WordPress SEO plugins offered. Yoast’s SEO plugin seems to be one of the most popular, as well as SEO Ultimate by SEO Design Solutions. I went with another popular choice, the All in One SEO Pack. In the end these plugins all do pretty much the same thing and my choice was motivated more by the aesthetics of how the plugin integrates with the dashboard and the edit page more than any reason. Yoast has a very good interface as well and also allows the user to analyze the page for things like keyword density, which many users may find very helpful. In my case, more than anything else I was attempting to give Google some text to grab on to in order to generate a site description for the search results page, so I didn’t feel the need for a bunch of bells and whistles, but some users may find these helpful and I probably would as well in a different application.

A view of the All in One SEO Pack’s interface during page/post editing

After activating the plugin and setting the values, it was time to sit back and wait to see if it worked. In this case, after about 24 hours I noticed an appreciable rise in both the search rankings for the site and the image rankings. Google also started catching the site description and loading that as opposed to random text from the page.
It should be noted for the novice user that these plugins have some very powerful features that can create disastrous results if used incorrectly. Many of these plugins utilize the noidex and nofollow features, which tell a search engine to ignore the contents of the page. When attempting SEO, except in very specialized instances this is exactly the opposite of the desired results, so unless you know what you are doing I highly recommend these options be left alone.

In summation, a WordPress SEO plugin seemed to work for this author, at least in this instance. It is definitely something I will be adding both to future sites and to the sites I am currently maintaining.

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