I read recently that Joost de Valk has been appointed as Marketing & Communications Lead for Wordpress (read about it in his blog if you want). I know that Joost has always been a bit of a WP evangelist so we probably shouldn’t be surprised but this does seem to quash any hope that Yoast will support CP. There’s no doubt that Yoast SEO is a great product and for most of us, it’s one of the first plugins we install. So this does seem to leave a bit of a gaping hole, one which will be difficult to fill. In the past, I’ve tried other SEO plugins but they haven’t come anywhere near Yoast’s standard.
Just wondering what the thoughts are around here? Anyone any suggestions for an alternative? Anyone want to fork WP SEO?
Yes, reading that blog it does sound like he is well and truly on the WP bandwagon, so I wouldn’t be looking for Yoast to be supporting CP.
It does leave a big hole as it’s a popular SEO plugin and I don’t know of anything else that comes close. It should continue to work with CPv1 and this will have long term support, so there is still a reasonable life-span there. But maybe it’s something that needs to be considered in the longer term.
I have never liked Yoast’s SEO offering. I’ve long suspected that most of the options it gives you do nothing except give the user a false impression of being “in control.”
I’ve just been thinking about plugins like Yoast, where they have a big market-share and seem to be the automatic No.1 pick. I imagine that the No.2, No.3 etc options would be quite interested in developing for CP, if we contacted them and said something like: “We don’t expect No.1 to be supporting CP, so how about you move in and get that market”.
People use Yoast because that’s become known as “the one to use”, but as Tim points out there are other options just as good/better. Should we pick one or two of those and make a concerted effort to ask that they consider working with CP?
I like that idea. Let’s remember to check the security history of whichever plugin(s) we approach - Yoast has a somewhat chequered record and it’d be nice to do better.
It just occurred to me that we are sort of going cap-in-hand to these people and saying: “please consider supporting CP”. Maybe we should be taking a line that’s more like: “Hey, this is a big opportunity and you might want to get in early.”
We are now compiling a list of CP-friendly options for “must-have” plugins, so developers could be encouraged to make a commitment to support CP, get their name down on that list and start picking up some new clients.
Do any of the above mentioned plugins handle scanning for keyword density, header usage, sentence length, passive voice, Flesch readability, paragraph length, or transition words?
