The Rise Of The SEO Plugin For WordPress
Based on downloads, here are the top SEO plugins for WordPress.
• All In One SEO Pack, AIO 12,605,050 downloads.
• Google XML Sitemaps with 8,780,897 downloads.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast with 2,520,999 downloads.
• SEO ultimate plugin with 928,982 downloads.
• Search Terms Tagging 2 with 349,545 downloads.
Evolution of SEO Plugins
SEO plugins became popular in 2002 with Headspace. It was used as meta-data for post, pages, categories, site name amongst other functions. This was followed by Google XML sitemaps in 2007, it function is to generate an XML site map. 2008 witnessed the introduction of Platinum SEO pack and all in one SEO pack. The former was used for automatic 301s, canonical URLs, edit titles and descriptions. The later defines Permalinks, edit meta title and keywords, page titles, definition of snippets, noindex and nofollow. In 2010, wordpress SEO by YOAST was developed. It was basically for definition of snippets, page analyses, technical WP SEO, access to robots.txt and htaccess, social integration. In 2011, platinum SEO pack was developed with automatic 301s, canonical URLs, edit titles and descriptions, add Meta tags.
The Rise of the SEO WordPress SEO plugin
According to Google trends, the search term “WordPress SEO pluggin” was searched 21 out of 100 searches in January 2008, it increased to 44 per hundred searches in 2009, 47 in 2010 and 72 in 2011. By January 2012, it was 91 per hundred searches on google.
Territories with the Most Searches for SEO plugins
– For United Kingdom, it is 22/100 (100 being the peak search volume in Google organic search)
– For the United States it is 24/100
– For Australia it is 25/100
– For India, it is 65/100
– For Indonesia it is 100/100
Google Announcement and Plugin Reaction
• January 4th, 2006, an announcement is made by Matt Cutts on the benefits of SEO with respect to the canonicalization for website owners.
• April 1st 2006, the canonicalization was released which allows users to utilize canonicalization tags to direct search spiders.
• 15 April, 2006, SEOs were alerted on the benefits of including XML sitemaps supports as expressed by Google algorithm.
• 5th December, 2006 marked the release of Google XML sitemap plugin which allowed users to create XML sitemaps through their WordPress sites.
• 6th March 2009, Matt Cutts explains the SEO benefit getting rid of file extensions for website URLS with respect to owners.
• 13th June 2009, a plugin was released that allows users to remove file extensions from the URLs of their websites.
It takes about 3 months for the WordPress community to react to the announcements from Google.
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