23 Oct WordPress Development – WordPress SEO Plug-in First Look
Another week, another experiment in the latest SEO technology. Yesterday, we installed the WordPress SEO Plug-in by Yoast and began to use it to help optimize our website and blog. In the past, we have tried playing with some other SEO plug-ins but have never been completely satisfied. It seems that this plug-in is different that many of the others, in the fact that it doesn’t, for lack of better terms, suck…
Looking For Answers – Enter Yoast
For a long time we have been trying to use a classic formula with our blog to attract business. The concept is clear, if your an expert, you can write a blog that answers someone’s question, if you do that, they will be more likely to sing your praises and possibly turn from reader to customer.
Last Friday I was searching around for blogs specifically about SEO for WordPress. I found a post by Yoast about optimizing the slugs (also know as URLs) for your posts and pages. Yoast recommended that you change to a specific setting and redirect all old links using his easy redirect algorithm. I took the code to our lead developer and she plugged it in. To our surprise, it actually worked!
Here is the extensive article that won us over and lead us to use his plug-in.
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
I can’t get no…
We have tried many “easy fixes” and SEO plug-ins over the years and have been thoroughly disappointed. There is a lot of out dated, unsupported, flat out miserable code out there. What won us over? His bug fix worked, and with good instructions at that! I am paraphrasing here, but in the article explaining how to use WordPress SEO, Yoast says something that rings very true; “There are no easy fixes in WordPress, anyone who offers an instant SEO solution should not be trusted. SEO takes work, its not easy, but this plugin makes doing that work faster and more efficient.” (Paraphrased)
The Test of Time
We started implementing yesterday, and will be using his optimization strategy for the next few weeks to see if it makes an impact. We will keep track of the progress with our web analytics looking to see if the plug-in starts to make a difference in our traffic and conversions.
If you wish to see the results of our experiment, check back to this blog in a few weeks. Or even better, sign up for our newsletter by leaving a comment below or using the sign up form in our sidebar.