WordPress SEO plugins have been done before, but never like this.

Offering direct control over more than 100 separate on-page characteristics important for SEO, while loading only around 600 lines of code for each ordinary page view and playing nicely with other plugins, this plugin has been designed from the ground up for performance and compatibility. (By contrast, the most popular SEO plugin configures only around 20 characteristics, demands more than 2000 lines of code for each page view, and employs crude output buffer hacks which can sap performance and trample on many other plugins.)

This plugin is intended for anyone who wants to help search engines find their material: it’s not just for professional marketers, it’s not just for those who make their living via the web, and it’s certainly not only for developers or full-time settings tweakers.

Should You Even Use an SEO Plugin?

It’s no secret that for years, most SEO professionals have recommended against plugins for any kind of serious WordPress SEO. While fine for ‘casual’ use, up until now plugins have been unable to compete with bespoke program logic and extensive manual theme integration for flexibility, completeness, performance and scalability.

Greg’s High Performance SEO now offers to everyone the kinds of benefits previously available only to those willing to invest in expensive bespoke coding and extensively hand modified themes.

The plugin will help you to leverage the built-in capabilities of WordPress — which is already a semi-decent SEO platform right out the box — by taking important content and meta-content that would otherwise not be included on the page and making it visible and useful to humans and machines alike. This is not automatic: it will take a little effort on your part. (Genuine SEO is never automatic.) But this plugin is designed to provide a sufficiently rich palette of tools that optimizing your site as it grows can become second nature to you.

To help with that, in addition to extensive inline explanations for each of its over 100 separate settings, Greg’s High Performance SEO also includes a detailed 5000-word usage guide and introduction to WordPress SEO. So you’ll never be left in the dark as to what on Earth a particular setting should or could be used for.

What Can You Do With Greg’s High Performance SEO Plugin?

This plugin enables you to configure several important SEO characteristics in each of these five areas:

  • Main title
  • Head section: description, keywords, robots indexing and following instructions
  • Secondary title, visible in the page body
  • Secondary description, visible in the page body
  • Paged comments and duplicate content

(Greg’s High Performance SEO focuses exhaustively and exclusively on genuine SEO characteristics, so if you want something to fix the coffee or insert your ad code, you’ll need a different plugin for that.)
The full set of SEO characteristics can be configured for each of the following types of output:

  • Home page
  • Posts
  • Pages
  • Paged comments
  • Tag archives (including support for the tag descriptions introduced in WordPress 2.8)
  • Author archives
  • Category archives
  • Search results
  • 404 page (irrelevant to SEO but helpful to site visitors)

The plugin provides configurable additions for the Post and Page writing and editing screens, as well as for the Dashboard’s QuickPress feature. All writing and editing additions can be restricted so that only contributors authorized to publish posts can use them.

Automatic Conflict Checker

A built-in conflict checker will let you know if it detects that other plugins may be interfering with your SEO preferences.

Support for Legacy SEO Plugins

Greg’s High Performance SEO also provides built-in support for titles and keywords left behind by alternative SEO and other legacy plugins such as:

  • All in One SEO Pack
  • Autometa
  • HeadMeta
  • Headspace
  • Platinum SEO
  • Related Posts
  • SEO Title Tags

WordPress itself seamlessly imports legacy data from several plugins, providing automatic support for the following additional plugins:

  • Jerome’s Keywords
  • Simple Tagging
  • Ultimate Tag Warrior

Sustainable Plugin Development

This plugin also demonstrates the new Sustainable Plugins Sponsorship Network, which aims to connect plugin developers with sponsors eager to support their creative efforts. You can easily switch off any sponsorship messages with a quick visit to the ‘Contribute’ page of your SEO settings; please see the ‘Instructions’ page for full details.

Learn More — And Get the Plugin!

You can learn more and get the plugin here on its main announcement page: Greg’s High Performance SEO.