The SEO Framework: fast and light

The SEO Framework is a WordPress optimization plugin created by Sybre Waaijer, a member of WPMU (Wordpress plugin development company). From this developer comes a plugin that presents himself as the only one who strictly follows the guidelines white hat ("clean" techniques to improve the positioning of our site). white-hat stands for staying safe from Google penalties. But, in addition, The SEO Framework is incredibly light, generating a minimal impact on the consumption of our site and without affecting performance.

In this note we tell you how to install it and we carry out an analysis of its enormous advantages, including screenshots.

The SEO Framework, although relatively new, already has more than 20,000 active installations and continues to grow.

calls himself “clean, dedicated, extensible, no restrictions, no strings attached and no ads”. what of no ads is not minor, since strong competition from SEO plugins is RankMath, but as we commented in our note of recommended plugins for wordpress, one of its evils is the consumption of resources and its weight.

Sybre Waaijer got tired of the SEO settings of themes and others —usually poor and incomplete according to his vision—, and decided to start write your own SEO plugin. Considering that he had learned a lot from his part in the WPMU DEV community, Sybre figured it was time to give some of his professional growth back to the world. In mid-2015, he published his SEO plugin and made it available to other WPMU DEV members. These clearly delighted. The plugin was so well received by the community that they convinced him to release it to the general public (lucky us all).

This was the moment when The SEO Framework began to take off. Today anyone can download it from here or add it from the WordPress Dashboard.

Activated our plugin, we will find enough to have fun in the new SEO section of our Dashboard.

The love put into this work is obvious, and the number of configurations can seem overwhelming at first (there are as many as to multiply the upper catch by twenty). However, the interface is not overwhelming by any means. If you make yourself a coffee and sit back and watch, you'll notice that The entire control panel of The SEO Framework is very intuitive. The interface is based on tabs that separate customizations of different kinds thus ensuring that sections with many parameters are simplified by dividing them into multiple tabs.

Without going into all the details, the bulk of The SEO Framework stands out for:

1. SEO indicators of each page and post

• T (title): Warns us if we have a configured title, and if it is too long or too short.
  The title is the title of the page, which by default will be the title of the page, but with the plugin we can edit it
• D (description): The meta description, or page description, can also be auto-completed.
• I (indexing): The page may be deindexed from Google, either because it is a private page or for any other reason.
• F (following): Are the links on the page taken into account?
• A (archiving): Whether or not we allow search engines to have an archive of the page in their cache.
• R (redirection): Sometimes we have redirects installed, SEO Framework quickly shows us if any of our pages or posts are redirected.

2. Post and page title settings

Being the Hs (headings) one of the most essential tags, having absolute control over them is a complete SEO necessity since SEO exists.

3. Descriptions and META descriptions

Another essential capacity, the antipodal of the decorative, is the possibility of completing the descriptions, and SEO Framework proves highly flexible about.

4. HOME settings

I don't think it is necessary to stress the importance of a home page. For this, The SEO Framework offers us a series of special rules and configurations that can be applied to our HOME in a specific way. In fact, we can even make configurations different from the standard ones for the rest of our content.

5. Open Graph and network sharing settings

Among the SEO tools at our disposal are those related to networks. Since the interaction of users with the content of our social media influences our site, we appreciate the options included in The SEO Framework to be able to take advantage of and manage the related elements: Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest OG tags.

6. Settings for Schema

The Schema structure allows us positively influence Google/Bing's interpretation of our content. Therefore, we appreciate the number of very powerful customizations that The SEO Framework gives us to sharpen the pencil of our online marketing.

7. META settings for Robots.txt file

For when we want to hide some content from the eyes of robots, The SEO Framework allows us complete control of no-index and no-follow tags.. This capability becomes vital in avoiding duplicate content due to the way, for example, WordPress generates multiple links for posts/categories.

8. Meta Settings for Google WebMaster

Those of us who do SEO follow the Google and Bing guidelines for a few good years. Therefore, that this plugin has a tool that facilitates the link of our site with these third-party tools is almost mandatory.

9- SiteMap Settings

We can include this tool in the same scenario as above: improve our site's communication with internet search engines. The site map is the file that, precisely, owns all links from our public content. The SEO Framework automatically generates this file on our server for Google and Bing to read.

10- Feed Settings

Unfortunately, there are some “scraper” robots on the internet that illegally track and usurp our original content to publish it as their own. The SEO Framework also thought about this and offers us the possibility of limiting the Feed of our RSS to an extract with a link. Thus, the Scrapers who "borrow" our content will receive just a few lines but, in addition, a backlink to our own site.

The plugin is complete

As we could see, all essential (and not so essential) SEO tools are included in the free version of The SEO Framework.

Rather than finding any gaps, we found that this plugin has more functionality than the vast majority of similar components. But there is something that remains to be seen: What about the SEO recommendations that The SEO Framework, like its peers, must make for each Page and Post? Does your intelligence measure up to the competition, outperform it, or suck? We will see.

SEO Settings for our Posts

On the SEO stage on-site, The SEO Framework offers us the following section of recommendations at the end of our content.

Those green lines are already telling us that we are doing well. Of course, in this case the Input META information is full of meefficient way. Otherwise, we would see something like this:

In short, we immediately understand what is happening and where we need more efforts. The number of characters it updates in real time as we type. Of course, if we type more, we will also receive an alert.

Likewise, we have control over the visibility of the publication along with the possibility of assign a custom image for our social networks (i.e. an image different than the typical WordPress featured image). This is useful because many times we want to add some advertising text to the image that goes to the networks, or an entirely different photograph, and/or with another size and/or resolution.

However, and something that many users have pointed out as a negative aspect, is that it is not possible to “rate” our GOALS based on a keyword. Following the example, our keyword for this content could be “wedding venues”. The SEO Framework does not have the ability to enter that information and then make any guidelines based on the position and number of keywords throughout the entire content. It is generally considered that not doing SEO around a specific word or set of keywords is synonymous with poor SEO.. That an SEO plugin provides us with recommendations around our Keyword is an almost obligatory point, regardless of whether we “heed” it or not.

Sybre, the creator of The SEO Framework, was asked about it. His answer is at least what we at Duplika imagined: he does not agree with targeting content around a keyword.

Sybre (and many others) believe that Google has enough intelligence to detect what content is talking about beyond specific keywords. It doesn't matter if we use the term "perro", "puppy" or "can", or if we call "balanced food" as "pienso" (typical in some Spanish-speaking countries).

Those who embrace this idea about SEO argue that optimizing content by repeating keywords and placing them in titles is still an attempt speculative rather than scientific. To tell the truth, Google's secret recipe to position pages in its search results hides perhaps the most "top secret" criteria of the information age in which we live today.

And yet… So many other studies claim to show that the precise keyword within the first paragraph, in the H1, Title and Meta-Description are an excellent way to “tell” Google/Bing robots what our content is about. . We at Duplika think: yes, but it is not enough, much less unbeatable. It is worth saying that the competition probably uses the same resources; ergo, it would be an "equality of conditions", but someone ranks first and someone in fifth place, and a third party does not rank directly. Again, Google's recipe holds many secret ingredients.

Embedded code on our site

The plugin incorporates the following code into our HTML:

If we want to disable it, we can use its extension for that purpose, or include the following code in the functions.php file of our template:

add_filter('the_seo_framework_indicator', '__return_false');