To answer my own question…
Yes. I do think they are overrated.
Now, pump your brakes. I’m not saying they are completely worthless, I just think some people assume they are THE definitive answer to some massive search engine ranking increase.
The Advantages
SEO plugins can be useful when they provide additional reporting features, display errors, reminders or if they help you utilize and understand basic SEO markup, build sitemaps, etc.
For example, Yoast allows you to create breadcrumbs to help people navigate through your site. This feature is not just beneficial for SEO, but for the user experience. 
Premium Plugins
Yoast happens to be free, but there are a couple of plugins on the market that are not. To be honest, I’ve never spent too much time researching them. No interest.
All I can say is I suppose there could be value if they provide additional reporting, tracking, etc. and do not make unrealistic claims about what they can do for your traffic.
But whatever you do, please do not install an SEO plugin (free or paid) and expect the search engine heavens to part while flooding you with traffic overnight.
Today SEO is largely driven by social media shares, the quality of your backlinks, your Google Authority and content. So waiting for a plugin to dramatically influence your rankings is unrealistic.
Why I Uninstalled My Plugin
I don’t have an SEO plugin installed on this blog anymore. Yoast was causing a conflict with my theme, which already has some fundamental SEO settings and options. And to be honest, I never really used many of the additional settings that Yoast provides anyway.
Actually, I was a tad bit overwhelmed by all the choices. The only settings I ever changed can be updated in my current theme, so I had redundant markup and some issues saving a few settings. Since disabling the plugin several months ago, I’ve seen no negative impact. As long as my posts are still getting indexed and I have the option to edit basic SEO settings that my theme provides, that’s all I need. 
And I just did another check…. My organic traffic is actually a bit higher than it was last winter when I had Yoast installed.
Now, I don’t want to get into cause and effect because I think it’s really hard to know what is specifically influencing SEO today. All I’m saying is it didn’t seem to make much of a difference having a plugin installed or not.
And for the record, I wasn’t too terribly concerned with what would happen to my Google traffic after uninstalling Yoast. Right now, only 35-40% of my blog’s traffic comes from Google… thankfully.
The rest comes from referring sites, email, social media, RSS, etc. And I’d love to get that SE percentage down to 25-30 and raise the other to 70-75. So if this blog was more dependent on Google traffic, maybe I would have been a little more reluctant (A.K.A. afraid) to make such a change. Having said that, I’m not convinced a plugin was making a big difference.
What About Sitemaps?
Now I do like the XML Sitemaps plugin. I have used this since the beginning and do feel it’s necessary to keep your sitemap updated and submitted. Most SEO plugins already has a sitemap feature, so you may not even need an additional plugin.
Yes, There’s Still Some Value
Hear me out. I’m not suggesting you run to uninstall your SEO plugin.
I just feel they are overrated when it comes to the traffic expectations — especially today. I also think you need to be very careful when you claim or assume some tool is drastically improving your rankings when Google now uses more off-page signals like social media and select backlinks to influence SEO.
And finally… multiple plugins are not going to give you any greater benefit. If anything, they can conflict with each other and cause a host of other problems such as duplicate tags, sitemaps and other markup issues. Now, if you can confirm the features don’t overlap that’s one thing, but be careful of installing plugins that perform similar tasks.
What Say You?
I’m really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. I can imagine some of you cannot even THINK of parting with your beloved plugins. 🙂 Am I the only one who feels they are overrated?
Love ’em or hate ’em, I want to hear from you!
Yesterday, I saw someone report that there were problems with latest version of All In One SEO Pack and when they updated the plugin, the tags and SEO titles, keywords and descriptions disappeared from all their pages and posts.
Fortunately, I did not update that plug-in when WordPress was signaling that update was available. I let new WordPress updates and plug-in updates sit for a few days or weeks until I see the dust settle and all the bugs are worked out.
Actually, I have been thinking about dumping my SEO plugin because of the extra work to put in a title, description and keywords. It is hard to just get a blog post up quickly when I have to be redundant and fill out the SEO plugin stuff as well.
Hey! Lisa,
I agree with you about SEO being Over Rated, but not all of them.
I believe why most these plugins are hyped is because most blogers and IMs want short cuts, they want quick solutions and Cheap Search Engine Rankings and they will run at anything that promises them such.
I personally have been a Fan of All in One Seo because of its simplity and less conflict with themes and plugins an it is the only SEO plugin that I recomend so mych for basic SEO settings.
Why I dont advice themes SEO option is because one may decide to change his theme at any time or betterstill opt for a custom design and believe me things will get messy after changing your theme if you are using te inbuilt theme SEO options.
It all boils down to choice, but so far, I have found AIO SEO to be the best! It just does the Job and it also underwent a Superb Update e few weeks back!
SEO plugins are convenient for autogenerating meta and OG values, but other than that, I find them near useless. There are much better, specialized plugins for keyword reports than Yoast.
SEO plugins are often something that people take for granted—if one works, they stick with it forever. While this works just fine, many are surprised to discover that there are many more SEO plugins and many different features designed for specific businesses and websites.
hey Lisa, I also using YOAST, after reading this your article, I have to review 🙂
Great post! Similar to my thoughts. they’re definitely over rated, but it reduces few work when optimizing. Other than that, they’re simply over rated.
Nice post and great information
Thanks for the “reasoned” approach to SEO. From what I read it comes down mostly to good content, good content, and good content.
This post should be shared so that people who uses and believes that “SEO PLUGINS” will bring them to promise land will be clarified with their beliefs. Thanks for posting this very informative post )
Onpage SEO is such a nice topic, sometimes is underestimated but we have to look carefully at this. I’ve been using the SEO plugin from Yoast but I am not considering remove it. I think it can be helpful as long as you do not over-optimize your content.
Nice post.
Ummm may or may not be.
Nothing much can be clarified, SEO plugins mostly results in making a post stuffed with a huge number of repeating keywords. This may sometime lead to bad summary of the post in the reader’s mind.
A very nice post considering all facts….keep sharing!!!
I have always been skeptical about seo plugin.plugins are helpful in making it easy to populate content that is necessary – the basic meta tag info etc.
multiple plugins do cause conflicts here and there. just stick with one basic one like yoast or all in one seo and you’ll be fine.
I don’t think there are overrated plugins. For as long as the plugin itself is very useful in your SEO campaign.
I’ve created sites that were SEO optimized in nearly every aspect possible, and ones that didn’t do anything other than have the keyword I wanted to target in the title. Honestly, I haven’t noticed much difference yet and right now I can’t decide if having SEO plugins installed is worth it. In the end I think Google will rank you for what they think you should rank for, regardless of the on-page SEO settings.
Off-page SEO is way more powerful, so I prefer to focus on what will deliver the most benefit, and that is off-page SEO. Right now I don’t spend too much time worrying about doing proper on-page SEO.
I used to use AIO and was happy with that but always wondered what I was missing out on with the Yoast plugin. Some time last year I watched/read a How To Set Up Yoast SEO plugin by you, Lisa. A couple of weeks ago I installed the Yoast plugin – partly because I remembered how detailed and helpful your How To guide had been, and the ‘what am I missing?’ feeling kept nagging at me. Then I saw many Yoast options I had little clue about.
So I went searching to find your How To guide for Yoast, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Now I would like to go back to AIO because it is easier with less choice, and I used to spend more time writing and less time SEOing with AIO. Now I read here that all my meta-descriptions will be lost if I change back to AIO.
The Yoast Plugin had a ‘transfer all meta descriptions from previous SEO plugins’ feature which worked well – I wasn’t even expecting to need something like that – silly, I know, but sadly that’s how naive I was.
The AIO doesn’t have that feature, so now I think I’m stuck. Any helpful suggestions? Anyone?
Hi Carol, I don’t think that was me that had the guide. I have recommended it in the past, but never really wrote much about the specifics because I never even used all the features that Yoast has to begin with.
To be honest, I would just stick with Yoast and not worry about all the other features you don’t use. Just make sure you optimize your description and title tag and be sure you have a sitemap. You don’t really have to worry about the other settings.
Thanks Lisa.
I use All In One SEO only because it allows me to write a description that will follow it on the search engines… okay, on Google most specifically. If I knew how to do that otherwise I wouldn’t have a great need for it.
Hi Lisa,
I have been searching for the seo plugins for increasing rankings. Thanks to your blog post I found useful one.
Plugins are really overrated too much.One thing we have to learn that plugins are like guide to us they arrange stuff according to our requirement else for making SEO campaign successful we have to make hard efforts
Hey Lisa,
Like the others who commented first, I totally agree about “SEO PLUGINS” being overrated. Everyone should understand that these plugins are made only to support you and your site. But the job of getting traffic and ranking high in search engines are rest upon your own shoulders and not with mere plugins. It is also true that plugins mess up sometimes especially if you don’t know which plugin is good for your site and which ones are not. This post should be shared so that people who uses and believes that “SEO PLUGINS” will bring them to promise land will be clarified with their beliefs. Thanks for posting this very informative post.
I have always been skeptical about seo plugin. I installed yoast seo plugin about four months back. Since that installation, I have only made use of the plugin on few of my post. I stopped using it when I did not see the so much talked about traffic. Although the plugin is still installed.
i would just echo sentiments that are scattered in this thread. plugins are helpful in making it easy to populate content that is necessary – the basic meta tag info etc. that said, they are pieces of code and can conflict with other code on your site. it’s best to use one, simple seo plugin and not co-mingle many.
further, one must understand that these are tools to help make the input of info easier. these are not tools that will magically make one rank on top of google overnight.
Agree Sunil!
Interstingly, when I installed an SEO plugin (I won’t say which one), my Google AdSense revenues took an almost immediate nosedive. I even posted about this in the Website Babble forums (http://www.websitebabble.com/showthread.php?t=26998&p=194489#post194489). Now, I just use my theme’s SEO features and it appears to work just fine.
Hi Lisa,
Excellent summary. After the fallout in ’12 with Panguin updates, I slowly started shifting all sites away from about 4-5 plug-ins I used for strategic SEO and link variance since ’08. Now, we do not rely on any plug-ins for SEO.
Genesis (love it with all my heart 😉 provides a killer seo-friendly framework, as you said, those fundamental settings it has really set your site up for fast page-loading and quick indexing.
My designer and I had a discussion on plug-ins in general a couple days ago, we concluded that our goal is to substitute small bits of open-source java in place of plug-ins whenever possible. Mainly because they are clunky and slow your website down, also IE/theme/other plug-in incompatibilities are always a concern with them.
I think the major fundamental shift in SEO now, is that all signals of you providing more content value are off-page. You can only artificially ‘pump up the volume’ to a limited extent.
I think the power of simply +1’ing, liking, retweeting is almost as valuable as a constantly updated XML sitemap. My wild assumption is that Google has a special algorithm for WordPress sites. That’s the foundation for policing spam and rewarding quality sources via their +1 profiles directly….They do make up, what 20% of all .coms on the web now or something crazy?
“Today SEO is largely driven by social media shares, the quality of your backlinks, your Google Authority and content.” – I completely agree, the shares are your sitemap and pings, the backlinks are your community, answers and tenure. Your authority is driven by that tenure (Page Rank) and the pace at which your insightful, influential content spreads in related topics to your key terms (co-citation / co-occurrence).
One tidbit to note, I really believe webmasters need to get acquainted with their analytics clearly, if they haven’t already, and optimize 4 specific things:
1. ave page load speed
2. bounce rate
3. goal conversion / visitor
4. ave time on site/page
Thanks for the great post Lisa!
Very well said, Matt. Appreciate you comin’ by!
Thanks for the “reasoned” approach to SEO Lisa. From what I read it comes down mostly to good content, good content, and good content.
Yes Lisa, I agree, I’ve been on a kick to use less plug-ins to increase my websites speed and less chance of being hacked as well. I have Yoast still and do love it, it’s really helped me to do write better copy but I do understand it’s quite complicated and can mess up themes if not set up correctly. I’m not sure if I would get rid of it. It’s a possibility though 🙂 It does mess up my shares on Buffer, keeps the title and website name as one. Fixed it and it’s back. So I understand how you feel about Yoast. You may inspire me to ditch it. Thanks!
Lisa guess what? I have been thinking lately whether I should get rid of Yoast plugin because it really conflicts with my Genesis theme and now I think is the right time, after I have gone through this post and some comments.
Either way way I have to install XML sitemaps so as to take care of sitemaps. Thanks. I have a question. Please I need wordpress ping list for 2013.
hi lisa,
i totally agree with you – once used to it we automatically “improve” our articles with time. the problem with all the plugins is that they often cause problems. e.g. the multilanguage plugin won’t let you create a feed for a podcast or a chat plugin causes a problem while loading the site. so yes, the less the better!
I once read a website showing how to improve your SEO using Yoast, just reading that was enough to confuse the hell out you.
I use a couple of plugins, mainly to add to WordPress what you would normally add to a static html page. WordPress in its base configuration doesn’t have any meta tags, so a plugin for that is added and also a site map generator.
Super helpful, as I’m just setting up a WordPress blog right now and wondering about the SEO part. I’m also using Genesis Lifestyle but installed a plugin, assuming it was required! 🙂 I don’t want to over-optimize and am more inclined to write for my visitors rather than the search engines so am totally down with just using Genesis’ built-in capabilities.
Do you have a list of items we should be SEO-ing (title/headline, couple times in the content, link, images, etc.)?
Hi Jennifer
I just try to mention the keyword I’m targeting once in the title and perhaps a variation of it in the meta description. Then I just write naturally. I don’t attempt to count keywords or worry about the keyword ratio/density. I think if you write for humans, interlink your content within your site in relevant pages and use the basic SEO tags, that’s all you need to worry about.
I do add alt and title tags to my images, but I try to make sure they describe the image, not the post. I think that is OVER-optimizing if you use image tags that match the post instead of the image itself. So if it’s a light bulb, the alt tag should be “light bulb” not “how to create a blog” for example.
Great, Lisa! I appreciate you taking the time to share your techniques with me! Now to get building 🙂
I actually received a notice from LiquidWeb this weekend warning that the recent hacking wave that we’ve been hearing about is targeting the W3 Total Cache and Yoasts WP Super Cache plugins. Kinda makes sense though since 9 outa 10 sites are probably using one of those plugins….
Interesting! Didn’t know this Scott. Thx for the info.
Hi Lisa!
I also stopped using the yoast plugin about 2 months ago for the same reasons. It has too many settings and the theme I was using at the time didn’t work well with it being installed. Maybe the Yoast plugin is for elite SEO atticts. Who knows! Overall, It’s cool to hear that your site actually did better without a SEO plugin Lisa!
Thanks!
Marc Bell
I have both Yoast and Genesis. If I deactivate Yoast, will all the meta title and description info I filled in on all my posts with Yoast be lost?
Also wondering what conflict you had between Yoast & Genesis – I want to make sure I’m not overlooking something.
Thanks!
Hi Sonia,
If you deactivate Yoast, all your meta descriptions and keywords will be lost and your meta title will match your post title.
The problem I was having with Genesis was that my custom SEO meta title would not save. But it now seems to work with an update to Genesis. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be plugin free now.
Excellent question Lisa,
I would say that an SEO plugin is useful because it makes ON-PAGE SEO easier but for someone experienced like yourself you already knows how to optimize a post for SEO so it really doesn’t help you it just gets in the way. Plus you’re theme does it for you.
I still recommend it for most people and I still use it myself because I want to make sure that I optimize posts for search although a well optimized article won’t be found if no one is searching for THAT particular keyword. So, yes there’s more to getting search traffic than just a well optimized post.
PS
I’m starting to get an idea for how you might have got the 100k pageviews without link building by the way are you leaving clues?
LOL! No clue intended. That site actually does have an SEO plugin still installed and I didn’t even think about it until your comment. Nice try though, Darnell. That was too funny. 🙂
Hi Lisa
hope your are as well as always. Hmmm, never heard of yoast but have gotten by so far with out. As for seo plugins and installation, would you be including the ‘all in one seo plugin’ in that, though I know it does not enhance traffic, I still believe it important for placing your post or page in it’s rightful place and position and with a few keywords in the description can really help your content.
What do you think?
Very informative post, Lisa, thanks! I use Yoast’s plugin in all my sites too and it really helped with learning how best to optimize my webpages, especially because of the “SEO score” feature that it has. But I’ve been considering removing it ever since I upgraded to the Genesis themes as they have very good built-in SEO settings as well.
The XML sitemap plugin is definitely essential for the all-important task of submitting sitemaps.
By the way, just have to say that I have been a fan of yours for some months now and your posts are always so refreshing and helpful to me. Keep up the good work!
Thanks, Claire! Glad I could help.
This is good to know, I have been using yoast but have not seen any difference in traffic more just piece of mind in thinking I covered all my bases
Not sure to be honest I use wordpress.org integrated into my site.
I use a SEO plugin but wether that gets me near to 1st page of Google or not “I don’t know”.
Could be down to Googles spiders liking my content, I’m not sure.
All I know is I’m up the top there (2nd page) atm with 2 articles (wordpress) when I type in the keyword search term “pool liners” (UK mind you) I’m up there
This SEO “stuff” is one big jigsaw puzzle in motion
It is definitely one big jigsaw puzzle and that’s actually what Google wants now. They don’t want you to be able to figure it out because it leads to manipulation and black hat. Going forward, SEO will continue to be quite nebulous. Just write for your visitors (not bots) and let the chips fall where they may.
“Just write for visitors not bots” Spot on Lisa… And change and add more content.(new pages)
Hello Lisa
Partially agree with you, that we can deal with the basics of SEO without special plug-ins, such as Yoast SEO. You have a simple situation – your theme allows you to enter the appropriate settings for SEO.
But those who use the theme without such facilities may feel lost – that’s when such a plugin is handy. This plugin helps to simply systematize the process of entering data into SEO.
As for the SEO – I think typing the post title, meta description, checking the appearance of our main keywords, checking whether we have pictures on our website – they are actually actions that help the job of search engines, such as Google, Bing, etc.
And it is good to make things easier for Google, Bing etc – if we rely primarily on organic traffic to our website – at leas at the beginning…
Best regards
I agree that SEO plugins are overrated. There’s definitely no magic about them- you will not rank without off-page optimization no matter how good your SEO plugin is. However they still have value for beginners, like me. This is the reason I use YOAST. But I can see how leading bloggers like you Lisa would find it unnecessary to have an SEO plugin giving the problems with having too many plugins installed. With your experience, you will know what it takes to rank for a keyword and you will also have your site properly set up. YOAST is free so I may not get rid of it even when I become more confident in my SEO skills but there may come a time when I know enough to feel that I don’t need it.
Sorry I inserted an incorrect username above, is there a way you can delete it. Sorry….
Ok, I’m a complete novice who is trying to learn the game as I can’t afford to pay anyone to create and administrate my site….plus I like to learn new skills. I have just spent the last month since installing Yoast updating all my posts. I still don’t really understand much about SEO but what really bugs me in my endeavor is all of the conflicting opinions. I am signed up to a number of websites such as this in my attempt to gain knowledge but you’re all a bit like the health industry who tell you one day that eggs are good for you and the next day you suld avod them. Can someone please write a concise guide about how SEO works and what you should do to improve your rankings……
Hi Roy,
I will recomend you use these Two Seo Plugins.. They are the beat and they dont have conflicts like most plugins do.
All In One SEO and Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Branchold.
I use SEO plugins and have wondered their worth but was reluctant to uninstall them, we need all the help we can get in my view! However I have had problems recently with an affiliate site, when my links started pointing at an entirely different site. Really weird problem that I only cracked when I turned off plugins one by one until things started working again. So I do now wonder.
Lisa, I second you. Not just with Yoast, but with most SEO plugins I see messing up of markups and meaningless tags creation. They conflict with both Thesis and Genesis (I use both themes between my blogs).
Also especially with Yoast, I don’t use all those features either so I uninstalled it from my blogs very long ago.
I recently installed SEOPressor and it severely conflicted with the markups and meta stuff. I also had a strange behavior – whenever I share the posts in Google+, the title of the post would come up 3 times – terrible. So I switched back to Easy WP SEO which I was using a while ago without any problems.
But if we are using Thesis or Genesis or any other theme that has a simple in-built SEO functionality, we probably don’t need an additional SEO plugin. But as of now I won’t uninstall Easy WP SEO coz it helps me a lot with content creation as well 🙂
Yeah I was posting on Google Plus once and couldn’t figure out why my title tag was displaying twice — I had too many plugins conflicting with each other. And I agree, themes like Thesis and Genesis already have enough in their settings for most people.
Do I have more options? When I subscribed I wasn’t presented with any (can’t remember where from).
Very timely post… I have been meaning to write to you Lisa because a few days ago I received one of your emails (I am a subscriber 🙂 ) ranting and raving about YOAST. I had been meaning to make the change for some time as my theme recommends YOAST but never dared. In any case after receiving your email I took the plunge but was TOTALLY overwhelmed by the sheer amount of settings. However, you said not to be scared of them, so I ploughed on.
However there was a problem with Google Analytics and couldn’t find the setting to change. I tried to contact technical support, but received no reply, so in this case it was a no brainer to ditch YOAST and go back to AllInOneSEO. However up until now it had been at the back of my mind that I should make the switch.. After all Lisa herself said it was worth it. But thankfully I can now put this idea to rest:)
Perhaps the YOAST people should understand that you could get too much of a good things and that WAAAAAY too many settings can put some people off (like myself 🙂 )
Ah yes. This was in my WordPress Starter Tips I believe? Now I need to go update that to at least mention I no longer use it. Thanks for the reminder.
Whoops. I replied in the wrong place before…
I was asking, do I have more options with your newsletter? When I subscribed I wasn’t presented with any.
Hi Andrea,
Waaayy too many settings is one of the reasons why I hate Yoast! I believe the plugin is doing waaay too mcuh than it can handle…
Th plugin is more of like a Combo of 5 Plugins and very Buggy!!!
I had no idea Yoast’s SEO plugin had a sitemap featured, I’ve been using the plugin for about six months and was using a separate sitemap plugin.
Personally I have no idea about SEO (hence why I leave it to my guest posters to write about this topic on my blog) but I have noticed an increase in traffic from Google since installing the plugin, not sure if it is a coincidence or not but I’m happy to keep the SEO plugin. 🙂
Hey Lisa,
I used to like this plugin, but every time I update it it creates 404 on all my tags and categories. Not sure if it has to do with the theme clashing with it (it does it on several different Genesis run sites) but no matter whose “fault” is it, I would always rather remove the plugin than change theme.
It sucks because there were a few times I forgot to go ahead and disable-enable plugin to fix this error and I would not know about this for day. took a lot of updates till I finally realized what was it.
There is a SEO plugin that will export all data from the plugin into the theme for those who want to remove it but are afraid of losing data, but I agree with you that SEO does not rely on those parameters as much anymore.
I actually use those metas now mostly to make the Google excerpt in the search engine look a certain way 🙂
Yeah I hear ya. As great as plugins *can* be, they can also be a royal headache when your theme starts to break! I have a love/hate relationship with them overall. 🙂
Hey lisa, agree with you.
Also want to point out something, SEO plugins are definitely overrated and even we don’t need them. None of them won’t give you any boost to your website rankings. They are just reminders that’s all. One of my niche websites hosted on Google(blogger) got top rankings for all my keywords till now for more than 1 year without installing any SEO plugins. I just update them weekly once. And take care in site’s structure and internal links that’s all. Content only matters not SEO plugins
Agree with you Lisa. In general I believe in less plugins the better. And themes like Thesis and Genesis already has SEO features (I use Thesis 1.8). You can’t replicate writing good content and actually interacting with people at the places they hang out. I consistently have 40-50% of my traffic coming from search engines for over two years now, but that is mainly because of long tails. The rest comes from subscribers and other websites. Never got hit by Panda or any other animals. I just write, but write with some basic SEO in mind, so both humans and robots can understand what I’m talking about. 🙄
Me too with regards to using LESS plugins. I think the fewer you have the better.
I think there are some SEO plugins which are overrated and not necessary at all.
However Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin, not only it offers simple solution to aid publishers optimizing their post, buy the plugin itself is also free.
I really like the added features like XML, breadcrumbs, integration.
There are some plugins which are not free but offers more or less the same as Yoast. So why go for a paid one?
Most of my traffic still comes from Google, so as you mentioned I am reluctant to get rid of the SEO plugin.
With that being said, I also author my own themes, so having an SEO plugin helps ensure that I cover all aspects of SEO for my theme. I do enjoy the added benefits of XML sitemaps and breadcrumbs that are included with Yoast’s SEO plugin, so that means two less plugins that I have to worry about.
I keep saying this but ONE day I’m gonna be like you, Paul and learn how to build my own theme from scratch. Probably won’t happen but a girl can hope! LOL
LOL – 1. I wish I had the time and; 2. I wouldn’t know where to start.
While I have the Yoast plugin I take the view that you shouldn’t try to engineer a page too much as this could appear spamming to Google’s algorithms. Currently my traffic is split fairly evenly with Google, Referrals and Direct traffic.
Hi Lisa. I totally agree with what you said about “SEO plugins” or any other related plugins for that matter will “auto magically” get websites ranking high in the SERPS or get instant traffic.
I think that making use of them is still interesting specially if a particular “theme” does not have at the very least the basics. Obviously, if one knows what they are doing then perhaps a plugin is not really required. Plugins after all do impact performance (site speed), and that is it yet another “factor” that search engines apparently are also looking into.
Yoast is a good plugin but like you said, there so many features that one would imagine if it is even necessary. But, you do need the basics and for that AIO or Yoast does help. Thinking about webmaster tools, analytics integration, sitemaps, breadcrumbs (Yoast), canonical, Google authorship, you know, the whole shebang 🙂
Overall, YES, SEO plugins do not provide instant rankings and traffic, and I agree that saying that, is unrealistic. Do they help? Done properly, I think it does… But your warning about using different sets of plugins all together is not recommended.
I’d say that’s a great summary, DiTesco!
hi lisa
I am sure I increased my knowledge and theoretical skills by reading this post.
thanks for sharing..