Maximize Your Blog’s SEO with the SEO Sniper WordPress Plugin

When I first ran across the WP SEO Sniper premium WordPress plugin, I wasn’t really sure what exactly to expect. After all, there is a popular free SEO WordPress plugin called All-in-One SEO Pack that has really become popular within the WordPress community. 

Being the premium WordPress plugin fan that I am, I immediately picked up a copy of SEO Sniper and began to test it out to try to get an idea of how it compared to the previously mentioned All-in-One SEO Pack.   For the purpose of this review, I will be comparing the two plugins to each other throughout this post.

After getting SEO Sniper uploaded and activated, I jumped over to the plugin settings panel and began to dig through the available features. I have to admit, I was instantly impressed!

From what I can tell, All-in-One SEO Pack is designed specifically for anyone to upload and activate for instant improved SEO, meaning it is designed for someone that doesn’t have any SEO knowledge.

SEO Sniper was created for those serious about SEO so that they can easily practice advanced SEO techniques on their WordPress blogs directly from their blog’s WordPress dashboard. They even offer 3 user profiles, so you can set the plugin to Mild, Moderate, or Aggressive.

Although things are displayed a little differently, it appears that SEO Sniper includes everything that use get with All-in-One SEO Pack, but it takes your control over your blogs SEO to a whole new level.

The plugin was based upon Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start manual, allowing you to easily implement Dan’s strategies on your WordPress blog. Based upon Dan’s suggestions, you should be:

• Preventing paged indexes and archives from being indexed by the search engines.
• Selectively nofollow links to the main index page from anywhere on your blog.
• Crafting a custom page title, meta keywords, and meta description for the blog home page.
• Nofollow category links on the category pages.
• Nofollow category links on the individual posts.
• Nofollow category links on the individual pages.
• Noindex all tag archives.
• Nofollow all internal tag links.
• Automatically build a footer page menu.
• Inserting Google Analytics code and Google site verification code.
• Specify if and where you want to nofollow links to the page.
• Specify if you want to prevent the page from being indexed by the spiders.
• Crafting a custom page title, meta keywords, and meta description.
• Prevent the page from being included in the WordPress list of pages.
• Specify a custom CSS file to be applied.
• Perform a 301 redirection on the page. (This is great for those wanting to cloak affiliate links)
• Linking the page or post to other pages and posts with custom anchor text.

Unlike All-in-One SEO Pack, with SEO Sniper, you can do it all!

• Give your important content more PageRank by cutting out redundant pages.
• Preserves more PageRank to be shared amongst your lower level content pages.
• Make your entry in the search engines stand out and entice more clicks.
• Push more PageRank down to your individual posts.
• Preserve more PageRank to be shared amongst your posts.
• Preserve more PageRank to be shared amongst your pages.
• Since tags are mostly for human benefit, the value of having tag archives in the search engine index is debatable.
• Preserve more PageRank to go to your valuable content.
• Give your blog a fully SEO’d footer menu with selective nofollows on the links.
• Include your Google code without having to edit your theme files.
• Precisely control how PageRank flows to a page.
• Keep unimportant content out of the search engine index completely.
• Make your entry in the search engines stand out and entice more clicks.
• Keep unimportant pages out of the list of pages. Many themes use the page list to build a main top menu. Control which pages appear in that important menu.
• Individually style a particular post or page if you wish to do so.
• Send request for, and the original PageRank, from a redundant post or page to a new post or page.
• Implement SEO Fast Start Tiered Pairing or Circular Navigation techniques on your posts and pages to give each post or page as much PageRank as possible.

Like All-in-One SEO Pack, you get an actual menu in your Write panel that gives you full control over that particular post, even going as far as to give you things like the ability to do a 301 redirect for that particular post (pictures above).

Overall I am very impressed with this plugin, though you should already be comfortable with basic SEO techniques before upgrading to this WordPress plugin.

If you decide to give SEO Sniper a try, remember that you have a 56-day money back guarantee, so it is essentially risk free. The author also promises regular plugin updates as WordPress changes, so you know it will be supported over time, unlike many free WordPress plugins.

You may also want to try it in conjunction with WP Affiliate Pro, as I have personally found that the two premium plugins work really well together.