[sc:wordpress-category ]Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to be a way to trick search engines in to thinking your site was more popular than it really was but we’ve come a long way since then.
The search engines themselves rendered the common SEO techniques virtually useless and so SEO moved on to become more of a series of recommendations to improve the quality of your site to ensure it had the best chance of being ranked highly.
A site I help administrate uses Yoast WordPress SEO with WordPress and so I’ve had to spend some time using it.
The short version? It’s kind of useless.
The slightly longer version…
The site is an information site for a WordPress plugin and really isn’t trying to drive traffic and therefore ad revenue. That makes the majority of the SEO recommendations kind of redundant, things like a post being too short doesn’t really make sense when the post is just a release announcement.
Likewise trying to optimize the posts to ensure they show up first on the search engines doesn’t really help as anyone who is looking for the posts are probably coming from the plugin itself.
I guess in certain circumstances it could help drive traffic, but for the majority of sites I don’t think it is all that useful, especially if you’re not trying to generate revenue through ads.
