Comment on Stallion WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Theme The world has moved on from when meta tags used to have serious value. Currently no meta tag has RANKING value in Google, the description meta tag may be used as the excerpt for a SERP which could increase the click through rate, but no increase in rankings.

On the SEO Advanced options page I’ve added a warning section at the bottom for plugins like the All In One SEO Pack plugin because they can cause loads of SEO damage (take a look at the page and warnings).

There are automated meta tags with Stallion, they are on the SEO Advanced options page. In Stallion and Talian you can use the WordPress excerpt for the pages meta description, if unset an excerpt is automatically generated.

About the only, possibly useful feature the all In One SEO Plugin has that Stallion lacks is the ability to set an independent title element (the plugin probably calls it a title tag even though it’s not a tag, it’s an HTML element!). I’d personally not use it, I set the title of a post with SEO in mind as it becomes the title element, but if you wanted two titles, one for the title element and one for other areas of the page (the default title of a page) you could do this with the All In One SEO Plugin Pack and similar plugins.

The meta keywords feature is a complete waste of your valuable time, meta keywords are so last millennium I have turned them off by default in Stallion (they have no SEO value anymore).

I’ve heard of the WordPress SEO Plugin SEOpressor, but not tried it, keyword density is so over rated. My approach to SEO copyrighting is if it reads and looks fine you can add those keywords.

Note how I wrote WordPress SEO Plugin SEOpressor and not just SEOpressor because this page is targeting the SERP “WordPress SEO Plugins”, more often a page uses those keywords (and derivatives), that would be WordPress, SEO and Plugin/Plugins without it reading spammy, the better. Get the idea, you don’t need a tool to determine keyword density, just read it to yourself and if you can add an SEO keyword without it reading like spam, add it.

If you view source of a Stallion page (like this one) you will see the title of a post is used within various headers, H1 etc… For a Post page like this one you’ll find the title of the post/page is within a H1 tag, so ideally you wouldn’t add more H1s. You can add more headers depending on the content. Avoid adding more H1s, aim for one or two H2s (how many depends on the size of the page, for a page like this good for adding derivative SERPs) and as many H3+ as works (again derivative SERPs and support main SERPs). there’s also built in H*s in the theme (view source to see them).

Alt text to images is helped a little in the theme, depends on what features you turn on, the auto thumbnails for example use the title of the post for the alt text. WordPress is quite good with linking, can be improved with a related posts plugin. I’m running a new one, but I had to fix it (breaks if you have a custom navigation menu), I’ve informed the plugin author and supplied the code I fixed, but so far no fix, so when I find the time will add it to this page (give me a few days to catch up after my dedicated server disasters, 3 dedicated servers in as many days!!!).

I’m going to be adding a new plugins list for Stallion as though I still use many of the plugins listed on this page, some I’ve changed (you wouldn’t go wrong using the SEO plugins above, the changes are just better versions of the same concept).

David