I’ve played with a few SEO plugins for Wordpress, and up until I installed Wordpess 2.61 I was using “SEO Title Tag” and “SEO Post Link” to do my dirty work, and they did it pretty well. These plugins added fields to each post, allowed you to reword the slugs to be more search engine friendly, and redefine the META tags for posts and pages, but stopped short of doing categories and archives.
However, when I installed 2.61, I discovered a plugin called “Headspace” which not only did what SEO Title Tag does, but provided a much better GUI in so much as that apart from including the extra fields in each post, it also provides a “quick edit” function for categories, archives, tags, the homepage and the generic parts of the blog. And it’s superb.
There are a couple of minor drawbacks to this Headspace plugin however. Firstly, the quick edit GUI doesn’t want to work in Internet Explorer, so I had to use Google Chrome – javascript errors. No biggie for me as I keep both browsers for testing anyway. Secondly, the “import” facility for my old META info put in via SEO Title Tag didn’t import properly so I had to set these up again.
Actually there was a third problem but even more minor. The terminology in Headspace for “tags” means “keywords” – so when you add tags via the plugin to each post, it then also makes your META keywords field from them. That’s not ideal for SEO as generally your tags are like categories and not as relevant as the META keywords. That said, Google ignores that META tag anyway, and with some careful decision making you can still get pretty close, partly aided by the fact that you can dedicate a different “slug” for each tag which is more aligned with your SEO techniques.
Those gripes aside, it’s definately an improvment over the previous two plugins, most notably for the ability to create seperate category, tag and archive META data. I’ve kept SEO Post Link for redefining the URLs of each post – it removes stop words – as this is definately a plugin that has an impact.