RS SEO Basics

The most minimal SEO plugin possible.

Description

The most minimal SEO plugin possible.

This plugin will add a bit of data to the HTML header:

• A META description tag.
• Open Graph meta tags.
• Basic Schema.org data.

That’s it.

What it doesn’t do

There are no fancy writing aids or multipage settings to navigate. In fact, besides a very basic settings page, the plugin is all but invisible in the admin interface.

Since WordPress does native XML sitemaps since version 5.5, this plugin doesn’t duplicate that effort.

There’s no Pro version, but it’s a WONTFIX issue. Sorry, not sorry!

Schema.org details

The output is fairly basic, based on the information already available to WordPress.

All schemas include WebSite, Organization, one or more ImageObjects and BreadcumbList.

All posts furthermore output these schemas: Article, WebPage, and Person (for the author).

Post types and taxonomy archives output: CollectionPage.

Author archives: ProfilePage.

Search results: SearchResultPage, CollectionPage.

For Schema types representing collections, the associated ImageObject is the featured image of the first post in the collection.

Settings

There is a single settings field, which is a YAML document describing site-specific modifications to the different Scheme.org types.

A simple example:

Organization:
  email: info@historywalksvenice.com
  sameAs:
  - https://historywalksvenice.com
  - https://twitter.com/HistoryWalks_Ve
  - https://www.facebook.com/historywalksvenice

WebSite:
  about: The History of Venice

This will add email and sameAs fields to the “Organization” schema, and about entry to the “WebSite” schema.

Modifications of almost arbitrary complexity can be made this way.

Beware that it is easy to create faulty Schema.org output. There’s a handy schema tester on the Schema.org site.

WP-CLI

There’s a simple wp-cli interface to help debug the YAML configuration.

The Schema.org output for various types of pages can be generated by these commands:

wp seo schema user login
wp seo schema post id|url
wp seo schema term term_id
wp sep schema post-type type
wp sep schema search word

To test a YAML file add the option --settings=<file.yaml>.

Featured images in AVIF format

Most social media won’t display featured images if they’re in AVIF format.

The plugin will, in such cases, generate a JPEG copy of the AVIF file, and use that in the Open Graph data.

ChangeLog

1.0

• First version — yet to come.

Installation

Like any other, but install RS Base Plugin first.

Download

This plugin requires the RS Base Plugin to work: Download stable version 1.14.11.