The Top 3 Wordpress Plugins for SEO

They have no idea of the features and benefits or pros and cons of any of those plugins. They are just repeating what other sheep say.

Wordpress doesn't need any extra plugins for SEO.

The top plugins are not for SEO but for Speed (Caching plugins) and for Security.

Apparently people have no idea what they are talking about.

Why would you list Yoast and All In One SEO in the top 3 together?

Yoast and All In One have pretty much the same features, you shouldn't use them both at the same time.

If Yoast is your top pick, don't suggest All In One as well.

David

I understand where you are coming from- the Wordpress plugins probably profess to do alot more than they actually do, but I do think they have their uses. Optimising and organising your page's metadata is surely quite a productive task for a wordpress plugin to do?

I agree though that overcoming poor HTML design or abundance of JavaScript would be a hard task to do, regardless of what metadata there

That's a really good question.

The answer is it depends, it can range from a small improvement to a large downgrade!

If you use the Yoast noindex and nofollow options you will damage your sites rankings, those waste PR.

Check this Google search out: https://www.google.com/search?q=yoast+noindex+damage

If you use the meta description tag correctly it won't increase your rankings per se, but if you know how to write ads that generate clicks your current search results could be more compelling. Since the meta description tag doesn't have ranking value, is it really an SEO feature? It's useful, but not essential.

The Yoast title tag is the interesting one. If you've named all your WordPress posts with SEO in mind: "Post About Keyword Phrase" your title tags will be along the lines of "Post About Keyword Phrase", but could include other stuff like the name of the site.

5+ years ago most WordPress themes set the title tags as "Name of Site >> Post Title" which has never been best practice.

Best practice for a site with no branding is: "Post Title"
Best practice for a site with branding is: "Post Title >> Name of Site"

So 5+ years ago there was a problem and for some WordPress themes and the SEO plugins like All In One SEO could fix the error without having to hack theme code, this issue still exists with some themes.

Yoast and plenty of other plugins allow the title tag to be overwrote with whatever format you set. If your theme uses the wrong best practice the Yoast title tag will help, if your theme developer has followed best practice you won't need a plugin.

Pretty much everything else Yoast supplies is fluff SEO. Breadcrumbs an SEO feature ROFLOL....
Social media stuff, no direct SEO value.
Sitemap can increase spidering speed, but won't increase rankings.

Nothing wrong with the above features, they have their uses, but they aren't really SEO features, they won't increase rankings.

The on-page optimization tips are based on the content only, they don't take into account your widgets etc... so if you focus a keyword and it says you have the density to low or something the density isn't taking the whole page content into account. It would be like looking at the number of times I've used "Title Tag" in this one comment and working out the density just for this comment and determining yes/no I have the density right for this entire webpage: basically a useful feature that's not accurate!

And that assumes Google uses keyword density per se as a ranking factor, it doesn't, the absolute density is irrelevant.

So Yoast can fix one theme SEO mistake (your theme might be fine) and adds some fluff features. Not exactly a killer SEO plugin, W3 Total Cache Plugin is more of an SEO plugin than Yoast, W3 total Cache is awesome on performance/speed optimization issues which are SEO factors.

I can poke holes in the popular SEO plugins all day.

David