WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk is easily one of the most widely used and feature rich SEO plugins for WordPress. Beginning in August Joost will begin offering a Premium Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin that includes support.

I’m a huge fan of WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk. It’s hands down the most full featured SEO plugins I’ve found. Out of the box WordPress is pretty well setup for decent SEO. Theme designers have really gotten on board with SEO as well and many are SEO enhanced. That said WordPress still has some room for SEO improvements. For instance, there’s really no reason to have your categories and tags indexed by search engines. In fact, if you want to minimize the number of duplicate content hits for your site you’ll want to set noindex, follow. WordPress SEO can easily handle this for you.

WordPress SEO and you

WordPress SEO helps you write better content. You can use the “snippet preview” and see what your post will look like in search results. It’ll show you things like length of title and meta description so you can optimize the length of each. It’s something simple… but something that’s also simple to forget. The plugin can also handle all of your sitmaps.xml. These XML sitemaps include the images in your posts & pages too, so that your images may be found better in the search engines too. Since SEO and Social Media have so much overlap WordPress SEO comes with a Facebook OpenGraph implementation and will soon also support Google+ sharing tags. Oh and it helps setup authorship, which is becoming increasingly important for Google. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though; and the plugin offers many more features than those outlined here. Read more about all the features offered in WordPress SEO at the WordPress plugin repo. While this plugin can be simple, it also has a lot of depth should you choose to dive in. If you really want to get the most out of it Joost himself has written The Definitive Guide to Higher Ranking For WordPress Sites, an in-depth article you should really check out.

A Premium WordPress SEO?

Right now WordPress SEO is completely free and it will continue to be free. So what will the “premium” version have the free version doesn’t? According to Yoast,

For those of you who dislike forums and want to be supported by me and the rest of the Yoast team, don’t fret. Starting in August, we’ll start offering a premium version of the plugin, including support (as in, you’ll get a direct email address and we’ll reply to your questions as soon as we can), at a yearly fee, starting from $89 for a single site to $349 for unlimited sites. That’s $29 a month for support on unlimited sites and just $7.50 for a single site. And of course we won’t remove the download from WordPress.org and we won’t disable the free forums, so you don’t have to pay us anything if you don’t want to.

 

The plugin will have some other functionality that’s not included in the SEO plugin (what? that’s still a secret 😉 ) and we’ll use those users as a “testbed”, if they want to, for new features.

So Joost has hired another developer and together they’ll be premium support. You’ll get new “secret” features, but better than that they’ll answer support questions so they don’t get lost on the WordPress forums.

Check out WordPress SEO here!