Seriously, I don’t use them at all. I don’t need them. And I’m willing to bet you don’t need them either.
I don’t know why so many people are so surprised by this.
You don’t need SEO plugins for good SEO
Yes, I’m dead certain of this. I’ve had nearly all my sites rank on the 1st page of Google search results without any SEO plugin ever. And this is going back for over 10 years now.
In fact, I think SEO plugins are more unnecessary now than ever.
Search engines keep getting smarter. They can guess what your page is about, and find its links quickly, and show the most relevant information. They already know how users find you, and what things users interact with the most on your site. They don’t need help. If anything, SEO tools are for you more than for Google.
The history of SEO plugins
Let me go over some WordPress history for y’all. If you haven’t noticed, the current trend for today’s WordPress themes is SPEED. All of them are advertising themselves to be the most fastest and lightweight theme ever created.
Well back in the days (like 8-10 years ago), the buzzword was “SEO”. Every WordPress theme was advertising itself as being the most “SEO-friendly theme” ever. And it was IMO the funniest most wild-wild west era of WordPress theme development ever.
There was much debate about:
- What were the best practices for optimal SEO?
- Which should handle SEO, the theme or the plugin?
- How to make SEO tools user-friendly for regular users?
- Do you even have to “optimize” for SEO?
Back then, SEO work was seen as being mostly content-optimization. Making sure your titles were wrapped in title tags. Making sure your site description was put in a meta-tag. Tag this, tag that. That’s literally what SEO experts were doing if you hired them. They created content (if needed), then optimized the content, and then probably did off-page stuff like linkbuilding and submitting to indexes and directories.
Well, WordPress themes quickly caught up. All the new ones were automatically wrapping titles in H1 and title tags and all the basic standard SEO practices. It’s not that hard! As it seemed…SEO was the easy part. The hard part was actually having content to optimize!
But who wants to create content? Hahahah. (Not most people.) Most people wanted to believe their poor SEO rankings were due to not having optimized enough. So in came the new batch of SEO plugins…each toting more “SEO features/functions” than the next.
So what do SEO plugins do?
Most SEO plugins do nothing other than teaching you basic SEO practices. They give little cues and indicators of places where you could have used your keyword more. Honestly, they’re just automated “content directors”. Or another way to think of them is as “live SEO checklists”. They’re like those free SEO report tools but they report to you live from your site.
Maybe they help you add tags and keywords to things like images. Maybe help you create inbound links. They help other content/search engines quickly figure out your content date, author, social media share image, and other data snippets.
- Do they actually write your content? – NO.
- Do they actually optimize your content? – MOSTLY NO. (You theme already does most of it.)
- Do they speed up your indexing rate? – NO.
- Do they have secret knowledge of Google’s algorithms? – Of course not.
See for yourself. What the hell do those SEO plugins do? Most of their functions are not even related to SEO. Just basic website stuff that can affect your traffic and search engine standards but don’t actually help your SEO. You’ll see functions like REDIRECTS, SITEMAP, 404 MONITORS, SOCIAL NETWORK LINKS/IMAGE. Not much else!!!
And most of these functions are better handled via other plugins or other services. Or not even necessary at all. You really think a small 15-page website needs a sitemap? Heck even if you had a 400-page site, if you need a sitemap you’re doing it wrong.
So nobody really needs an SEO plugin?
Yeaup. You don’t need it at all. If you understand basic SEO principles. And you’re using a well-coded theme (or even just a run-of-the mill one), I’m quite confident it’s already coded well enough for standard SEO practices. And that you don’t need anything else other than to make great content and share it.
By all means, keep your SEO plugin if you like it and you feel it’s helpful. Can also keep it if you like certain functions. But if you’re only keeping it around for the fear of being penalized without one, I’ll happily reassure you that won’t happen. SEO plugins can be useful; all I’m saying is you don’t need them for high search engine rankings.
I’m also thinking about removing my current SEO plugin. I only use the Sitemap generator from these SEO plugins. Rest of the features feels too much bloat to me.
Absolutely! Take the red pill!
After reading your article, I decided to use the SEOPress plugin haha
Hahaha, let me know how you like it.
can I get a whooha?
yes you can & deserve it!
HAHAHAH @ Richard!
Do you think that you could give us an example of SEO’ing a post without an SEO plugin? I see tons of people talking about SEO, but nobody does any real-life examples. my 2 cents worth!
-Scot
SEO means to optimize for search engines, right? So let’s pretend you have a homepage and want to optimize it for the keywords “cheap cars”.
– Go to the page title, put the words “cheap cars” (or some variant spelling of that) in there.
– Make sure the page title is wrapped in h1 tags…except only, you don’t have to do this since your theme does it already.
– Make sure the title tag has “cheap cars” in it as well…your theme does it already! (If you put it in the page title or website title or website description).
– You CAN put the keyword in the meta-description tag (via theme SEO settings or SEO plugin settings). Or you can just put in the first paragraph of text as Google would rather read the actual content.
– You can put up an image with a filename “cheap-cars.jpeg” and use the alt tags of “cheap cars”.
All this can be done in your content editor. No SEO plugin needed for all on-page optimization. There might be a few minor schema stuff that can be done with specific plugins but you really don’t need an SEO plugin. And even if you miss some…JUST BELIEVE ME, Google is smart enough to know what your site is about!
If we don’t use Yoast etc., what’s the best way to write/edit the title and descriptions on each WP post? (Assuming we don’t want the H1 to be our SEO title)
I think it’d be easiest to let your post title be the H1 and title tag as that’s how most themes work already. I’m curious to know the reasons why you would want it to be something else?
Same goes for descriptions…let the post be that for you. Google often pulls the description snippet from your actual post text anyway.
I have limited space for the H1 in my theme’s design, and I want the title to be incentive for people to click.
Can you share a link?
TERRIBLE advice. Your Title should be different from your H1, and you ABSOLUTELY need to craft your own meta description for SEO purposes, to give visitors a brief summary of what is on the page. Most SEO plugins are garbage, but pick a light-weight one for the titles and meta descriptions if nothing else.
– I’m pretty sure having your title as H1 is the standard. You can see Neil Patel’s site for yourself. https://neilpatel.com/blog/h1-tag/
– “Need to craft your own meta description” is also pretty much outdated advice (I saw the writing on the wall over 5 years ago). Anyway, you can see these guides:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/will-meta-descriptions-go-extinct/240967/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/when-to-write-meta-descriptions/264057/
In any case….I’ve done just fine, but you’re welcome to do as you please. Best of luck to you.
Neil Patel – the thief of the internet–nope.
https://monsido.com/difference-title-tags-h1-tags
Your OWN link tells you the importance of a meta description. LOL
Ummmm, the link you shared actually validates my thoughts moreso than negates it. As per my previous comment, having the H1 and title tag the same is standard practice. Standard practice in both the development world and SEO world. The only argument left here is whether or not there’s added SEO value in differentiating them. (Obviously, we know there’s a difference in how it’s shown and branded words may or may not add value.) And the article…which you picked…even states you shouldn’t differentiate unless you have a good reason to do so.
The link I shared talks about how and why meta description is used…along with why it doesn’t affect SEO much nowadays (which you argued). My only disagreement with you is in the latter part (regarding its importance with SEO). Please follow your own debate terms carefully so you don’t get lost in my responses.
I really advise people to NOT use the same page titles as your H1s.
I think it´s a waste.
H1s gives us an opportunity to add more targeted keywords into the most important heading on the article.
But, again, going, either way, won´t impact much your site´s global SEO health.
my 2cc
What about schema? Do you handle this yourself, use a plugin, or none of the above?
On all of my personal sites, I don’t use it at all whatsoever and couldn’t care any less. But if you have certain post types or CPT’s that can benefit from specific Google integration or categorization, I suppose it can help. If I cared at all, it would be for ecommerce purposes. Whether via plugin or custom-coded, depends on my use case of course. Logic would dictate you should be able to code it easily into CPT’s and to use CPT whenever you have truly specialized content.
For what it’s worth, I think Google is getting better at figuring all this themselves. You don’t have to spoon-feed things to them. If you’re using a popular CMS, you can trust that the WordPress and Google will figure out how to tell each other about your content.
Hi Johnny.. ‘m on your ideea about seo plugins, after i tested 95% off them.. full of bloat in database .. now on real estate website i use Seo framework, becouse is lite, fast, secure, and little intelligent.. The enterprise Extension pack..the developer deserve it!
Not so experience like you, but i ve figure out google listen only to content and himeself.. no seo plugin can tell google what to get from website.. beside that, maybe google will get what x or y seo tell s him, but after one month or on new algo update.. you go down.. and really down.
That s the part i like Seo framework – lite, secure, fast, excellent code quality, WHITE hat seo only by google guidlines..
Yes, I agree. Google gets what it wants! Google decides what is valuable. All you can do is prioritize and taxonomize your content. And I’m a huge fan of The SEO Framework. It was the developers favorite alternative when it first came out and still thriving years later.
Thx for the reply…
Its very toxomized the content.. in ppoperty types, offer types, labels, features, country, states, city, area, agent city, agent speciality (residential, commercial etc.)
but only index state, city, area.. and blog post, some page for local neigbourhood that i work now, and the property page… i know it s a little bit hard in real estate seo..
on taxonomy page i have to put some text content , not only the properties from specific taxonomy and meta content.. true content text.. it will work?
I’m not sure I understood what you wrote but generally, you try to have content on whatever page you make. If the page is important, make sure you add content and can also add helpful snippets and code tags to let crawlers know how different content bits relate to each other.
thx Jonhhy.
I ve said: in archives page created by taxonomy, like states, city, etc, i want to put some text ( 300 characters), i think is good for google.. also the state taxonomy page has properties available in that state! ex: http://www.exemple.com/properties/new-york you ll see properties in new york but no text content! only properties with one photo, small title.. see here (but no english from now) http://www.agent-imobiliar.ro/oras/sector-1 – can put some text above properties ” about new york” ..on my site about sector 1
“So nobody really needs an SEO plugin? Yeaup. You don’t need it at all. If you understand basic SEO principles. And you’re using a well-coded theme (or even just a run-of-the mill one)”
But that’s the point, isn’t it. Most people don’t and aren’t. Most are running really crappy themes that are, well crappy. And so their SEO is crappy too.
Its OK for you, and me too I guess, to say “I don’t need them…”, but most people do.
Terence.
can you give me a SEO framework recommend settings 😉
Great article, what matters is the content, the main reason to use SEO plugins for me sitemap and schema, which is in some website e-commerce are important. Google is smart to figure it out especially if you are using WordPress, but it’s best if you add it.