I optimize some of my WordPress sites without an SEO plugin because often, they simply have more features than I need for certain projects.
In this column, you’ll learn how to do WordPress SEO without an SEO plugin.
This is not intended to persuade you to not use one, but to show you how to take full control of your SEO without a plugin if you so choose.
SEO Plugins Are Useful
SEO plugins are recommended solutions for publishers who cannot code PHP, who are lost with HTACCESS files, and for those to whom robots.txt files are a mystery.
The technical side of SEO has a relatively high bar in terms of coding. SEO plugins democratize web publishing.
A major complaint about SEO plugins is how bloated with unnecessary features they are. But this isn’t the case across the board.
There are SEO Plugins that are lean and fast as well as modular, so you can choose which SEO features you need.
An example of this kind of SEO plugin is The SEO Framework. It’s an excellent choice for those who want more control over their SEO but prefer to pick and choose the features they need.
SEO plugins are the safe choice for publishers who are risk-averse and don’t want to experiment with alternatives. A lot is at stake, so the best choice is often the most trusted solution.
Why I Don’t Use SEO Plugins
This year, because of the headaches caused by an SEO plugin bug, I launched a site without any SEO plugins. I was happy with my results and transitioned other sites away from SEO plugins.
I moved away from a single SEO plugin simply because it seemed I could control a website’s SEO better.
It was a round trip journey back to where I had started with WordPress — optimizing WordPress without a dedicated SEO plugin.
Reasons I Do Not Use an SEO Plugin
There are four reasons why I don’t use an SEO plugin:
Features that duplicate what’s already in WordPress or in a theme.
Unnecessary features that solve presumed problems.
The complexity of SEO plugins can introduce numerous bugs and conflicts with other plugins.
Greater control over SEO.
Reasons Why I Prefer Standalone Solutions
Easier to code a solution that handles one problem.
Some SEO features don’t need a plugin.
Standalone solutions are easier to maintain.
Leaner WordPress installation without unnecessary features.
SEO Features You Need for WordPress
WordPress has a fairly robust core nowadays. Things like canonicals are done automatically.
Many WordPress themes contain SEO features like schema markup, breadcrumb navigation, Open Graph meta data, and so on.
While your exact needs will vary according to the template you use, here are a few things to look for.
Necessary WordPress SEO Features
Breadcrumbs with Schema.org Structured Data.
Meta descriptions.
Open Graph meta data.
Removal of category base.
Schema metadata.
A way to easily add the nofollow attribute to selected links.
WordPress Plugins for SEO
Optional WordPress SEO Features
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs is a useful feature.
Adding Schema structured data to it will get you enhanced listings if you rank in the SERPs. And the enhanced listings may help the click-through rate.
It’s possible to code breadcrumb navigation without a plugin. The code is supposed to go into your website’s “child” functions.php file.
Most tutorials say to add it to your theme’s function.php file but you’ll lose your breadcrumbs if the theme is updated and the functions.php file is part of that update.
Getting breadcrumbs right can also become complicated because you still need to associate schema markup with the breadcrumbs. So that’s even more coding.
It can be done but at this point, it might be easier to offload the responsibility of making sure it works to a plugin.
The NavXT plugin was the subject of a medium-level vulnerability but it was quickly patched. This was unusual for this plugin and unlike more serious events associated with dedicated SEO plugins, it did not cause problems for users.
Meta Description
I have found Easy WP Meta Description an adequate solution for meta descriptions. Meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor but they do show in the SERPs if you rank.
Google will rewrite your meta description if a phrase from your web page is a better match. With that said, Google does a fine job of providing a relevant snippet from your page.
So it’s up to you. You can add your own meta description or let Google tell the user why your site is relevant to the query.
Title Tag
I craft an article title that is adequate to use as a title tag. If it’s good enough to serve as the title of the article, it should be good enough as the title of the web page. There are workarounds for coding this into the theme as well as plugins but I think those are superfluous.
Open Graph Meta Data
Strictly speaking, this isn’t an SEO feature but could influence how much traffic goes to your site. It allows you to specify an image and wording to show when your URL is shared on Facebook and Twitter.
Open Graph Meta Data plugin helps you present a professional appearance that will appeal to potential site visitors.
Remove Category Base from WordPress
The word “category” isn’t necessary for your URL structure. Shortening your URL to the domain name, the actual name of the category, and the page name is a best practice.
A shorter URL is easier to remember, less likely to be mistyped, and can tell users and search engines what the page is about using the least amount of words. Read more about the Remove Category Base plugin here.
WordPress Plugin for Schema Structured Data
The Schema WordPress plugin will integrate most Schema structured data you’ll need, including reviews and article schema.
Schema markup can be coded by hand, as well. For example, you can take the JSON-LD script for reviews and paste it into the bottom of your review directly into the WordPress editor while in Text Mode.
Then, manually adjust the descriptive fields for rating, product name, etc.
JSON-LD review template with author:
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "http://schema.org/", "@type": "Review", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Thing", "name": "NAME OF PRODUCT" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "NAME OF REVIEWER" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": "ENTER THE RATING EXPRESSED AS A NUMBER", "bestRating": "ENTER A NUMBER THAT REPRESENTS WHAT THE TOP SCORE IS, LIKE 5 OR 10" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "NAME OF YOUR PUBLICATION" } } </script>
Pretty much every element of structured data can be handcrafted and manually or even automatically inserted on a post-by-post basis, or by editing your template directly.
You don’t have to use a plugin. But the plugin is clearly the best way to scale this process and have it up to date no matter how often WordPress updates.
Ultimate Nofollow Plugin
The Ultimate Nofollow plugin adds the option to make a specific URL nofollow at the moment you are creating that URL. There are additional options for sitewide nofollows, should you need those. But I don’t use them.
Optional SEO Features for WordPress
Attachment Pages Redirect
If you have inadvertently created web pages for every image attachment in your WordPress site, this plugin will easily solve your problem.
The Attachment Pages Redirect plugin will restore your individual attachments to their correct behavior. Just install and activate it and that’s it, your problem is solved.
The Attachment Pages Redirect plugin needs no setting up. Just activate it and forget it. Fixing rogue attachment pages couldn’t be easier.
Just make sure to use the correct setting for redirecting attachments to the post when uploading media in the future.
Redirect manager
This is a useful plugin if you feel uncomfortable editing htaccess files to create redirects. Use this if you have a legitimate reason to redirect an old page to a new page.
404 Responses Are Not Unhealthy
Don’t use a redirect manager to redirect a deleted page to the home page.
Some SEO plugins try to scare you into believing that 404 error codes affect the “health” of your site. But that is incorrect. 404 response codes are not inherently harmful to the “health” of your site.
Some 404 responses are due to spammers linking to your site with a partial URL. That’s normal and nothing to worry about. The 404 response is the perfect response.
Some 404 responses are due to an internal linking error by the publisher. That’s your error (you mistyped the URL). That’s something to fix by updating the URL to the correct URL.
The truth about 404 response codes is that they are perfectly natural and do not make your website less healthy.
“There’s no need to “fix” crawl errors on your website. Finding 404’s is normal and expected of a healthy, well-configured website.
If you have an equivalent new URL, then redirecting to it is a good practice. Otherwise, you should not create fake content, you should not redirect to your homepage, you shouldn’t robots.txt disallow those URLs — all of these things make it harder for us to recognize your site’s structure and process it properly. We call these “soft 404” errors.”
If your site is not updated often, you can crawl it with an app like Xenu Link Sleuth and choose the option to create an XML site map. Then you just upload it to your server. No web hosting resources are needed to generate the map other than allowing Link Sleuth to crawl your website.
You may find features included in SEO plugins that are redundant or not necessary.
Canonical URLs
Canonical URLs are built into WordPress. You don’t need an SEO plugin to handle this.
Robots.txt and htaccess File Editors
If you have a text editor or an HTML editor, then you have all you need for editing a robots.txt file or updating an htaccess file. Additionally, you should only mess with those files if you know what you’re doing.
If you are skilled enough to edit these, then you don’t need a WordPress plugin to handle this. Just open your text file and an FTP app like a normal person, right?
404 Status Code Redirection
SEO plugins provide this under the mistaken belief that 404 status codes are harmful. As noted above by Google’s John Mueller, 404 response codes are fine. Just fix the ones that are due to actual errors, like a typo in the URL.
Sitemap Generators
As noted above, a site map is not strictly necessary because Google crawls URLs via RSS feeds and links.
However, a site map is useful if you have made major changes and want Google to discover them as fast as possible. In this case, a manually generated site map is useful, as you don’t have to install a plugin to generate it.
You can still install a site map generator plugin and that makes far more sense to do than installing a huge SEO plugin to do this one single task.
Keyword Research and Word Processing
WordPress and your server resources might not be the best platform for conducting keyword and word processing functions. If you want a real-world app for checking your content, use a real software program like the Hemingway App. If you want to do web page analysis use a real app that generates a word cloud.
All of these kinds of functions are limited on an SEO plugin anyway. A standalone app will do a better job.
Why Use Six Plugins Instead of One?
An all-in-one SEO plugin might be just a single plugin, but it’s still behaving as if it’s ten or more plugins.
Count the features on your SEO plugin and count each one as a single plugin. You’ll be surprised that you could be larding up your WordPress site with the features of twelve plugins – features that you may not need.
So the question shouldn’t be about whether you need six plugins versus one. The question should be how many features do you need?
For me, the clear answer is a lot fewer features that are offered by all-in-one WordPress SEO plugin solutions.
All in One is Not the Same as All You Need
As you can see, SEO plugins are useful for users who have little to no skill with coding or WordPress. SEO plugins accomplish an important task for users who don’t have the skills to choose what solutions they need.
A dedicated SEO plugin is a good choice for a large organization that wants to play it safe and not have to deal with individual plugins or handcrafted solutions.
However, for those with more skill or who aren’t constrained by bureaucratic constraints, SEO plugins can be overkill.
People are installing SEO plugins by default, essentially sleepwalking through their WordPress SEO.
This article shows that you don’t need everything a dedicated SEO plugin offers.
There are alternatives to installing an SEO plugin with features you don’t really need. An all-in-one solution may not be what you need.
Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter, announced that starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators. The new policy applies only to ads that appear in a creator’s reply threads.
The move comes on the heels of YouTube launching ad revenue sharing for creators through the YouTube Partner Program in a bid to become the most rewarding social platform for creators.
Social networks like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have similar monetization options for creators who publish reels and video content. For example, Instagram’s Reels Play Bonus Program offers eligible creators up to $1,200 for Reel views.
The catch? Unlike other social platforms, creators on Twitter must have an active subscription to Twitter Blue and meet the eligibility requirements for the Blue Verified checkmark.
The following is an example of a Twitter ad in a reply thread (Promoted by @ASUBootcamps). It should generate revenue for the Twitter Blue Verified creator (@rowancheung), who created the thread.
Screenshot from Twitter, January 2023
To receive the ad revenue share, creators would have to pay $8 per month (or more) to maintain an active Twitter Blue subscription. Twitter Blue pricing varies based on location and is available in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.
Eligibility for the Twitter Blue Verified checkmark includes having an active Twitter Blue subscription and meeting the following criteria.
Your account must have a display name, profile photo, and confirmed phone number.
Your account has to be older than 90 days and active within the last 30 days.
Recent changes to your account’s username, display name, or profile photo can affect eligibility. Modifications to those after verification can also result in a temporary loss of the blue checkmark until Twitter reviews your updated information.
Your account cannot appear to mislead or deceive.
Your account cannot spam or otherwise try to manipulate the platform for engagement or follows.
Did you receive a Blue Verified checkmark before the Twitter Blue subscription? That will not help creators who want a share of the ad revenue. The legacy Blue Verified checkmark does not make a creator account eligible for ad revenue sharing.
When asked about accounts with a legacy and Twitter Blue Verified checkmark, Musk tweeted that the legacy Blue Verified is “deeply corrupted” and will sunset in just a few months.
Regardless of how you gained your checkmark, it’s important to note that Twitter can remove a checkmark without notice.
In addition to ad revenue sharing for Twitter Blue Verified creators, Twitter Dev announced that the Twitter API would no longer be free in an ongoing effort to reduce the number of bots on the platform.
While speculation looms about a loss in Twitter ad revenue, the Wall Street Journal reported a “fire-sale” Super Bowl offer from Musk to win back advertisers.
The latest data from DataReportal shows a positive trend for Twitter advertisers. Ad reach has increased from 436.4 million users in January 2022 to 556 million in January 2023.
Twitter is also the third most popular social network based on monthly unique visitors and page views globally, according to SimilarWeb data through December 2022.
We live in an age when AI technologies are booming, and the world has been taken by storm with the introduction of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is capable of accomplishing a wide range of tasks, but one that it does particularly well is writing articles. And while there are many obvious benefits to this, it also presents a number of challenges.
In my opinion, the biggest hurdle that AI-generated written content poses for the publishing industry is the spread of misinformation.
ChatGPT, or any other AI tool, may generate articles that may contain factual errors or are just flat-out incorrect.
Imagine someone who has no expertise in medicine starting a medical blog and using ChatGPT to write content for their articles.
Their content may contain errors that can only be identified by professional doctors. And if that blog content starts spreading over social media, or maybe even ranks in Search, it could cause harm to people who read it and take erroneous medical advice.
Another potential challenge ChatGPT poses is how students might leverage it within their written work.
If one can write an essay just by running a prompt (and without having to do any actual work), that greatly diminishes the quality of education – as learning about a subject and expressing your own ideas is key to essay writing.
Even before the introduction of ChatGPT, many publishers were already generating content using AI. And while some honestly disclose it, others may not.
BankRate started publishing articles written via AI, they even disclose it on the site. I have found 160+ articles. The first article I was able to find dated April 2022. It would interesting to see how these articles rank. Original finding by @tonythill. #AI#gptchat#SEOpic.twitter.com/BY9JlUZBiz
Also, Google recently changed its wording regarding AI-generated content, so that it is not necessarily against the company’s guidelines.
Image from Twitter, November 2022
This is why I decided to try out existing tools to understand where the tech industry is when it comes to detecting content generated by ChatGPT, or AI generally.
I ran the following prompts in ChatGPT to generate written content and then ran those answers through different detection tools.
“What is local SEO? Why it is important? Best practices of Local SEO.”
“Write an essay about Napoleon Bonaparte invasion of Egypt.”
“What are the main differences between iPhone and Samsung galaxy?”
Here is how each tool performed.
1. Writer.com
For the first prompt’s answer, Writer.com fails, identifying ChatGPT’s content as 94% human-generated.
However, when I tested real human-written text, Writer.com did identify it as 100% human-generated very accurately.
2. Copyleaks
Copyleaks did a great job in detecting all three prompts as AI-written.
Screenshot from Copyleaks, January 2023
3. Contentatscale.ai
Contentatscale.ai did a great job in detecting all three prompts as AI-written, even though the first prompt, it gave a 21% human score.
Screenshot from Contentscale.ai, January 2023
4. Originality.ai
Originality.ai did a great job on all three prompts, accurately detecting them as AI-written.
Also, when I checked with real human-written text, it did identify it as 100% human-generated, which is essential.
Screenshot from Originality.ai, January 2023
You will notice that Originality.ai doesn’t detect any plagiarism issues. This may change in the future.
Over time, people will use the same prompts to generate AI-written content, likely resulting in a number of very similar answers. When these articles are published, they will then be detected by plagiarism tools.
5. GPTZero
This non-commercial tool was built by Edward Tian, and specifically designed to detect ChatGPT-generated articles. And it did just that for all three prompts, recognizing them as AI-generated.
Screenshot from GPTZero, January 2023
Unlike other tools, it gives a more detailed analysis of detected issues, such as sentence-by-sentence analyses.
Screenshot from GPTZero, January 2023
OpenAI’s AI Text Classifier
And finally, let’s see how OpenAi detects its own generated answers.
For the 1st and 3rd prompts, it detected that there is an AI involved by classifying it as “possibly-AI generated”.
AI Text Classifier. Likely AI-generated
But surprisingly, it failed for the 2nd prompt and classified that as “unlikely AI-generated.” I did play with different prompts and found that, as of the moment, when checking it, few of the above tools detect AI content with higher accuracy than OpenAi’s own tool.
AI Text Classifier. Unlikely AI-generated
As of the time of this check, they had released it a day before. I think in the future, they will fine tune it, and it will work much better.
Conclusion
Current AI content generation tools are in good shape and are able to detect ChatGPT-generated content (with varying degrees of success).
It is still possible for someone to generate copy via ChatGPT and then paraphrase that to make it undetectable, but that might require almost as much work as writing from scratch – so the benefits aren’t as immediate.
If you think about ranking an article in Google written by ChatGPT, consider for a moment: If the tools we looked at above were able to recognize them as AI-generated, then for Google, detecting them should be a piece of cake.
On top of that, Google has quality raters who will train their system to recognize AI-written articles even better by manually marking them as they find them.
So, my advice would be not to build your content strategy on ChatGPT-generated content, but use it merely as an assistant tool.
As the content battleground goes through tremendous upheaval, SEO insights will continue to grow in importance
ChatGPT can help content marketers get an edge over their competition by efficiently creating and editing high-quality content
Making sure your content rank high enough to engage the target audience requires strategic planning and implementation
Google is constantly testing and updating its algorithms in pursuit of the best possible searcher experience. As the search giant explains in its ‘How Search Works’ documentation, that means understanding the intent behind the query and bringing back results that are relevant, high-quality, and accessible for consumers.
As if the constantly shifting search landscape weren’t difficult enough to navigate, content marketers are also contending with an increasingly technology-charged environment. Competitors are upping the stakes with tools and platforms that generate smarter, real-time insights and even make content optimization and personalization on the fly based on audience behavior, location, and data points.
Set-it-and-forget-it content optimization is a thing of the past. Here’s what you need to know to help your content get found, engage your target audience, and convert searchers to customers in 2023.
AI automation going to be integral for content optimization
As the content battleground heats up, SEO insights will continue to grow in importance as a key source of intelligence. We’re optimizing content for humans, not search engines, after all – we had better have a solid understanding of what those people need and want.
While I do not advocate automation for full content creation, I believe next year – as resources become stretched automation will have a bigger impact on helping with content optimization of existing content.
CHATGPT
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language generation model that leverages the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture to produce realistic human-like text. With Chat GPT’s wide range of capabilities – from completing sentences and answering questions to generating content ideas or powering research initiatives – it can be an invaluable asset for any Natural Language Processing project.
The introduction on ChatGPT has caused considerable debate and explosive amounts of content on the web. With ChatGPT, content marketers can achieve an extra edge over their competition by efficiently creating and editing high-quality content. It offers assistance with generating titles for blog posts, summaries of topics or articles, as well as comprehensive campaigns when targeting a specific audience.
However, it is important to remember that this technology should be used to enhance human creativity rather than completely replacing it.
For many years now AI-powered technology has been helping content marketers and SEOs automate repetitive tasks such as data analysis, scanning for technical issues, and reporting, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI also enables real-time analysis of a greater volume of consumer touchpoints and behavioral data points for smarter, more precise predictive analysis, opportunity forecasting, real-time content recommendations, and more.
With so much data in play and recession concerns already impacting 2023 budgets in many organizations, content marketers will have to do more with less this coming year. You’ll need to carefully balance human creative resources with AI assists where they make sense to stay flexible, agile, and ready to respond to the market.
It’s time to look at your body of content as a whole
Google’s Helpful Content update, which rolled out in August, is a sitewide signal targeting a high proportion of thin, unhelpful, low-quality content. That means the exceptional content on your site won’t rank to their greatest potential if they’re lost in a sea of mediocre, outdated assets.
It might be time for a content reboot – but don’t get carried away. Before you start unpublishing and redirecting blog posts, lean on technology for automated site auditing and see what you can fix up first. AI-assisted technology can help sniff out on-page elements, including page titles and H1 tags, and off-page factors like page speed, redirects, and 404 errors that can support your content refreshing strategy.
Focus on your highest trafficked and most visible pages first, i.e.: those linked from the homepage or main menu. Google’s John Mueller confirmed recently that if the important pages on your website are low quality, it’s bad news for the entire site. There’s no percentage by which this is measured, he said, urging content marketers and SEOs to instead think of what the average user would think when they visit your website.
Take advantage of location-based content optimization opportunities
Consumers crave personalized experiences, and location is your low-hanging fruit. Seasonal weather trends, local events, and holidays all impact your search traffic in various ways and present opportunities for location-based optimization.
AI-assisted technology can help you discover these opportunities and evaluate topical keywords at scale so you can plan content campaigns and promotions that tap into this increased demand when it’s happening.
Make the best possible use of content created for locally relevant campaigns by repurposing and promoting it across your website, local landing pages, social media profiles, and Google Business Profiles for each location. Google Posts, for example, are a fantastic and underutilized tool for enhancing your content’s visibility and interactivity right on the search results page.
Optimize content with conversational & high-volume keywords
Look for conversational and trending terms in your keyword research, too. Top-of-funnel keywords that help generate awareness of the topic and spur conversations in social channels offer great opportunities for promotion. Use hashtags organically and target them in paid content promotion campaigns to dramatically expand your audience.
Conversational keywords are a good opportunity for enhancing that content’s visibility in search, too. Check out the ‘People Also Ask’ results and other featured snippets available on the search results page (SERP) for your keyword terms. Incorporate questions and answers in your content to naturally optimize for these and voice search queries.
It’s important that you utilize SEO insights and real-time data correctly; you don’t want to be targeting what was trending last month and is already over. AI is a great assist here, as well, as an intelligent tool can be scanning and analyzing constantly, sending recommendations for new content opportunities as they arise.
Consider how you optimize content based on intent and experience
The best content comes from a deep, meaningful understanding of the searcher’s intent. What problem were they experiencing or what need did they have that caused them to seek out your content in the first place? And how does your blog post, ebook, or landing page copy enhance their experience?
Look at the search results page as a doorway to your “home”. How’s your curb appeal? What do potential customers see when they encounter one of your pages in search results? What kind of experience do you offer when they step over the threshold and click through to your website?
The best content meets visitors where they are at with relevant, high-quality information presented in a way that is accessible, fast loading, and easy to digest. This is the case for both short and long form SEO content. Ensure your content contains calls to action designed to give people options and help them discover the next step in their journey versus attempting to sell them on something they may not be ready for yet.
The audience is king, queen, and the entire court as we head into 2023. SEO and content marketing give you countless opportunities to connect with these people but remember they are a means to an end. Keep searcher intent and audience needs at the heart of every piece of content you create and campaign you plan for the coming year.