Search engine optimization

SEO Tools for WordPress

You’ve heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To that cliché we can add another: Advanced SEO is in the eye of the beholder, too.

WordPress.com announced Monday a small set of what it’s calling “Advanced SEO Tools, ” and if you’ve been doing SEO for even a little while now, it should make you smile. It’s a trio of tools that includes

• the ability to write custom meta descriptions for blog posts;
• the ability to write custom title elements for different pages, such as having some page titles formatted as Post Title | Site Name and other page titles formatted as Site Name | Tagline; and
• a preview tool that shows how a URL will look in Google’s search results, or when shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re a WordPress.org user — i.e., you run WordPress as your content management system for a self-hosted website — these are basic tools offering functionality that can be found via almost any popular SEO plugin. But these tools are built for WordPress.com Business Plan users, a group that likely consists of small business owners and others who’ve never had a website before and have little understanding of what SEO is all about.

So don’t laugh at what WordPress.com calls “advanced” SEO tools. Instead, just smile about it and be reminded that what’s basic to most SEOs is still advanced to almost everybody else.

About The Author

Matt McGee is the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. After leaving traditional media in the mid-1990s, he began developing and marketing websites and continued to provide consulting services for more than 15 years. His SEO and social media clients ranged from mom-and-pop small businesses to one of the Top 5 online retailers. Matt is a longtime speaker at marketing events around the U.S., including keynote and panelist roles. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. You can reach Matt via email using our Contact page.