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The SEO Framework – Automated, Effortless, Fast.

By The SEO Framework Team

Description

The only feature-complete SEO plugin that follows the white-hat guidelines and rules imposed by WordPress and search engines.

Start using proven methods to optimize your website for SEO. Clean, dedicated, extensible, unrestricted, ad-free, and no strings attached.

To top it off, this is the fastest full-featured SEO plugin, and it blends right into your WordPress website, without leaving you in the dark.

It’s easy to get started. Activate this plugin, and your site’s instantly protected against prominent SEO attacks. The SEO Framework will also prefill all critical meta tags for you. A real time-saver. Ingenious.

Migrate | Setup | Improve | Extensions | API | Support | Privacy

We poured over 18 000 hours into this plugin. Here are the results:

  • It is brilliant.
    The SEO Framework is an expert system for SEO. It is the only solution that can intelligently generate critical SEO meta tags in any language by reading your WordPress environment. This automation saves you a considerable amount of time that could be used to write more content or focus on other tasks. It also removes the need for advanced SEO knowledge.

  • It comes preconfigured.
    With The SEO Framework, we provide an excellent starting point for your website by rationally optimizing all your pages. Naturally, you can also tweak it however you like. If you’re not an SEO expert, learn what you may wish to optimize in our Setup guide.

  • It helps you optimize your metadata.
    We made the only SEO plugin that follows Google’s webmaster guidelines to the letter. It took years of research and tweaking to translate this well inside your WordPress interface. Finally, you can freely optimize your pages without having to worry about making critical mistakes.

  • It creates a beautiful overview.
    On your post overview pages, you’ll find color-coded guidelines. They suggest you how to improve your pages as you hover over them with your mouse. For example, when your titles are unbranded or when WordPress blocks indexing. Instinctively, touch-and keyboard navigation is also supported.

  • It includes exceptional support.
    We don’t outsource our support. We’re here for you. Feel free to drop by our support forums at any time to ask a question. More than 1400 inquiries have been answered personally, typically within 48 hours in the past five years.

  • It leaves no room for errors.
    We focus on the quality of features you need over the quantity on features you don’t. This trait makes this plugin unique, faster, more accurate, nearly bug-free, and more sustainable. The added benefit is that your site is unlikely to get penalized by search engines. We won’t steer you into writing unnatural content or allow you to trick search engines.

  • It remains genuine and pure.
    We built The SEO Framework for small to large corporations and enterprises. The interface is entirely accessible and seamlessly integrates within your dashboard. Therefore, interacting with this plugin feels natural. It might feel dull, but your WordPress dashboard shouldn’t be a billboard for our branding. We won’t ever change this.

  • It improves search presence.
    The SEO Framework ranks your website distinctively by enabling breadcrumbs for Google Search, and by automatically generating titles and descriptions according to Google’s guidelines. It also notifies Google, Bing, and all connected search networks automatically of your website’s changes with its built-in sitemap.

  • It makes social sharing easy.
    The SEO Framework automatically supports and allows you to further tailor the Open Graph, Facebook, and Twitter Cards protocols. It helps your posts stand out when they’re shared on various social networks, including Pinterest, Discord, and Whatsapp.

  • It feels more than accessible.
    We handpicked our color scheme so that people with any medically recognized color-vision deficiency can distinguish the guidelines set by search engines. We also implemented full keyboard-navigation and screen-reader support.

  • It protects you from mistakes.
    The SEO Framework steers you from making significant and common SEO mistakes. It leaves little room for you to mess up because the plugin already does everything SEO for you. For example, it automatically prevents duplicated content mistakes by enforcing strict canonical rules.

  • It follows best-practices and beyond.
    The biggest problems with WordPress plugins are security and compatibility. As part-time security researchers, we focus on making this plugin impenetrable. The SEO Framework also uses WordPress’s API whenever possible, making this plugin integrate neatly with every other plugin written with that in mind.

  • It has developers at heart.
    We encourage other developers to enhance and add functionality to this plugin. We’ve done so ourselves, already, with our extensions. Check out our API, and feel free to contribute!

  • It respects your privacy.
    The SEO Framework sends us no information and does not create cookies. Learn more from our strictly adhered-to privacy policy.

Getting started

Do more with extensions

For additional functionality, check out our free companion plugin Extension Manager. It provides numerous free and paid extensions, such as:

  • Focus guides you through the process of writing targeted content that ranks with focus keywords and synonyms.
  • Articles enhances your published posts by automatically adding important Structured Data.
  • Honeypot catches comment spammers through four lightweight yet powerful ways.
  • Cord helps you connect your website to Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
  • Local lets you set up important local business information for search engines to consume.
  • AMP binds The SEO Framework to the AMP plugin for AMP supported articles and pages.
  • Monitor keeps track of your website’s SEO optimizations and statistics.
  • Incognito hides all development-comments from The SEO Framework.
  • Origin redirects attachment-page visitors back to the parent post.
  • Title Fix makes sure your title output is as configured. Even if your theme is doing it wrong.

Visit our extensions overview page for more information.

Unbranded, free and for the professionals

The SEO Framework is a uniquely white label plugin that blends seamlessly into your WordPress dashboard. This means that we don’t even put the name “The SEO Framework” anywhere within your WordPress interface. No ads, no nags. Nobody has to know about the tools you’ve used to create your website. Note that we output standardized development-comments distinguishing the plugin output in source code. You can remove these with our free Incognito extension.

Behind the screens

The SEO Framework works on many things without notifying you, because the best software is fast, nimble, responsive, and should save you precious time. Here are a few things it does behind the screens.

  • It prevents canonical errors for categories, pages, subdomains, and WordPress Multisite domain mapping.
  • It stops SEO attacks that are caused by pagination exploits in WordPress by telling the search engine to look at the existing last page instead.
  • It discourages 404 pages and empty categories from being indexed, even when they don’t send a 404 response.
  • It automatically notifies Google and the Bing network on website updates when sitemaps are enabled.
  • It discourages search engines from indexing feeds and the sitemap. This doesn’t mean they won’t use them; only, they won’t show them in their search results.
  • It directs search engines from the comment pages back to the post storing those comments.

Compatibility

The SEO Framework supports:

  • PHP 7.2 and higher.
  • WordPress 5.5 and higher.
  • Internationalization through WordPress.org.
  • Unicode (UTF-8) character recognition and rendering, including Emoji and CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese).
  • Right to Left (RTL) languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, et al.), through its interface and metatag generation.
  • Complete color-vision deficiency accessibility thanks to a carefully picked color scheme.
  • Full keyboard navigation, so that you can inspect tooltips quickly without ever having to reach for your mouse.
  • Full screen-reader accessibility via field anchors, ARIA labels, and title attributes.
  • WordPress Multisite setups, this plugin is in fact built upon one.
  • Detection and output of robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
  • Full integration with WordPress Core sitemaps.
  • Output of structured data via Schema.org JSON-LD scripts.
  • Altering oEmbed for improved sharing on Discord.
  • Detection of various other SEO tools to help you switch graciously.
  • Translation plugins like WPML, Polylang, WPGlobus, and MultilingualPress.
  • E-commerce plugins, like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
  • Editing posts and terms via WordPress’s native bulk-and-quick-edit interfaces.
  • Headless mode via a single constant definition.

Copyright legislation notice

In a few words: The SEO Framework allows search engines to do what they’ve been doing for the past 20 years via its preconfigured copyright settings.

When you activate The SEO Framework on any site, you automatically grant rights to content aggregators, among Google, Bing, and Yandex, to obtain and use information from the site, including written work, images, audio, and video. You can control these rights via the robots-meta settings brought by this plugin. Your rights and the effectiveness of these settings are subject to your website’s region and language, and the physical or virtual origin of the platform and their potential users through which your website’s information is obtained and shared. It is up to the aggregator to honor your rights and the requests brought via The SEO Framework.

If you wish to learn more, please refer to the EU commission on copyright. These rulings may propagate its effects through regions outside the EU.

Screenshots

  • The SEO Framework shows you how your site is performing, at a glance. These are what we call the SEO Bar.
  • Hover over, tap on, or focus any SEO Bar item and it will tell you what's asserted from your environment.
  • The SEO meta box is displayed on all pages. It's everything you need. Here you can see the pixel counters.
  • These SEO settings are shown on the term edit screen. It seamlessly blends into your WordPress interface.
  • The SEO settings page of The SEO Framework. Every setting is explained thoroughly. You're in full control.

Installation

This plugin requires:

  • PHP 7.2 or higher.
  • WordPress 5.5 or higher.
  • Any modern browser for administration.

Installation instructions:

  1. Install The SEO Framework either via your WordPress dashboard using plugin search or by uploading the files to your server.
  2. Either network-activate this plugin or activate it on a single site.
  3. That’s it! The plugin now optimizes your website for SEO. It also protects your website against SEO attacks.

This plugin auto-configures its global settings

However, it would be best if you read up on our plugin setup guide to get the most out of The SEO Framework.

This plugin auto-configures SEO meta settings

However, you may want to read up on our page improvement guide to learn how you can optimize your pages.

Get more SEO power

Optionally, also install our free Extension Manager plugin for additional SEO solutions.

FAQ

Is The SEO Framework free?

Absolutely! It will stay free as well, without ads, tracking, bloat, or nags!
This plugin is slim yet all-inclusive. It’s 100% freeware, not crippleware.

Is there a premium version?

No. We treat this plugin as a premium plugin already.

However, we do offer many free and paid extensions that help support this free plugin. We provide these via our free Extension Manager plugin.

Why is there no analytics, tracking, or 404 monitoring?

SEO experts that use advanced tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, and Google Analytics prefer using The SEO Framework because it doesn’t try to do their job haphazardly.

To correctly analyze your website, it must be done from the outside. If we load these features on your site, bad robots will cause thousands of false positives that fill your database with useless information that doesn’t apply to search engines. We refrain from this because it won’t ever help you anyway.

I have a feature request, a question, or found a bug.

Please visit the support forums and kindly tell us about it.

We’ll try to get back to you within a week. Typically, we reply within three days.

I am a developer; how can I help?

Any input is much appreciated, and everything will be considered.
Please visit the GitHub project page to submit issues or even pull requests.

Learn more about contributing.

What do the colors tell me?

We use different colors to convey messages. Red is an error that you must resolve. Yellow is a non-critical warning that you may want to address. Green is good. Blue is informational and situational. Gray is undefined or unprocessable.

The sitemap doesn’t contain categories, images, et al.

Not having every single page listed is not an issue. Search engines love crawling WordPress because its structure is consistent and well known.

If a visitor can’t find a page, then why would a search engine? Don’t rely on your sitemap, but on your content and website’s usability.

Check out our Extension Manager. It brings extensions, like Articles, that fill in the gaps via modern and more robust means.

The sitemap contains unwanted links.

The SEO Framework takes all publicly queryable posts, pages, and CPT and puts them in the sitemap.

If you don’t want a page in the sitemap, consider enabling the noindex option for it. This option will also remove the page from search engine result pages.

If the link shouldn’t be in the sitemap because it’s meant for structural reasons, then inform the plugin or theme author that created them.
You should tell the author to check out the “public and rewrite post type arguments.” The plugin or theme author should know what that means.

In the meantime, you can disable SEO for the unwanted entries via the “General SEO Settings” under “Exclusions.”

Why aren’t focus keywords included?

Google warns about the keyword stuffing approach implemented by some other SEO plugins. It forces users to write unnatural content, and it can have adverse effects on your site’s ranking.

Modern search engines use AI to understand the context of your articles. This means that as long as you write relevant content, you shouldn’t have to worry about keywords.

However, we implemented the same API Google uses to help you find appropriate synonyms and inflections for your keywords. This functionality is part of our premium suite of extensions.

What do the application/ld+json scripts do?

The JSON-LD scripts are search engine helpers that tell search engines how to connect and index the site. We do this via the Schema.org standard.

They can tell the search engine if your site contains an internal search engine, which social sites you’re connected to, and what page structure you’re using. This is also referred to as structured data.

I don’t see the breadcrumbs!

The SEO Framework does not provide the display of breadcrumbs. This is theme-territory. This plugin only annotates them for search engines via a JSON-LD script.

If you wish to display breadcrumbs, then your theme should provide this. Alternatively, there are other plugins that help you do this.

Reviews

Best plugin out there, but to sell is normal

January 12, 2022
I know most things I'll say won't make sense for the power user, and I'm aware this plugin is more targeted in that direction. But I think the sweet spot is with the average user. While your plugin is probably better at everything, they are better at selling. And that's a bummer. Sybre and Lebaux - Absolute great persons and pretty much every other developer/reviewer/user talks nice about them. But sometime they seem a little bit bitter that the product maybe doesn't have the success that they wish or maybe it doesn't produce the right amount of money. It's probably exhausting at times to juggle all these responsibilities. It's probably exhausting to know you have a great product and way better principles and yet people still choose Rankmath. Why not appeal more to the "average" user? The interface right now, although very fast, it's quite overwhelming. The documentation feels like it's made more for the power user. I have friends that are tired of Yoast sending them notifications and ads 24/7. I tried recommending them this plugin, but it's not appealing to them. The interface seems too complicated at first, the website doesn't say much to be honest. People love the principles, that's great, but what about why this plugin is better vs the competition. How can this plugin can give them more vs the competition. Why not make it even more clear why your plugin is better? Yoast, Rankmath, AIOSEO are ruthless when it comes to comparing their features with the others. Make a table chart, make blog posts, show how this plugin is better in comparison with the others. There's a ton of people tired of Yoast and Rankmath. I know some people will laugh... but where are the pictures, the tutorials, the videos. Why does the plugin has no import function? I switched from Rankmath and I tried using the recommended import plugin, but it doesn't support Rankmath. So I had to install Yoast to import from Rankmath and then import to SEO Framework from Yoast. This is not a negative review. I use the plugin and I love it. I also love everything the team stands for. But to sell is normal, it's not a shame. People have to eat, work has to be rewarded. People that are against that, probably have no idea what kind of work goes into this. Sometimes the open source community can be extremely toxic. I couldn't care less if you add a notification from time to time. Or if you make the GO PRO button flashier (Hell! Make it RGB). Really. Times change, and it's no shame to move a little bit away from the old thinking. This rigidity, while noble, can hurt at times. Sure, you'll have a few open source extremists that will probably yell that you've changed, but who cares. I hope you guys understand what I said comes from the right place. I'll stick with you no matter what. But if someday you decide to be a little bit more pushy with your selling approaches, know that many people will understand and will stay by your side.

Simply the best

January 5, 2022
Just an amazing, so so light and powerful plugin. I love it, period.

Great plugin, fair monetization and helpful developer

January 2, 2022
Among all the free SEO plugins The SEO Framework has quickly become my go-to choice due to its focus on essential features in favor of avoiding unnecessary components that come with many of its competitors and add additional weight to WordPress. With the free version users already get all basic SEO settings one would want, with the option to install extensions (both free & paid) that offer a fair pricing policy in my opinion. Support also seems superb with the plugins' developer being quite active and putting in a lot of effort to assist even free users on the forums.

Advertising on the dashboard

November 24, 2021
Please see: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#11-plugins-should-not-hijack-the-admin-dashboard This is annoying enough to log in and leave a review. I like your plugin and I'm sure you're going to say "But it's a small ad!". It's still an ad. It doesn't belong on any page but your plugins. Marketing notifications: 😡 Being a developer having to deal with users like me: 😭 Not changing my opinion on using the dashboard for marketing, but changing my review because it's tough out there for open source devs: 😳

From pro for pro

November 16, 2021
Well thought, well designed, well delivered. No unneccessary options, no spam, no ads, no bloat. Great for professionals.
Read all 296 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“The SEO Framework – Automated, Effortless, Fast.” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“The SEO Framework – Automated, Effortless, Fast.” has been translated into 22 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “The SEO Framework – Automated, Effortless, Fast.” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

4.2.3

This minor update addresses a regression where the singular-archive canonical URLs always pointed to the first page.

4.2.2

This minor update addresses a regression where the homepage canonical URL was missing a trailing slash.

4.2.1

This minor update addresses a few regressions brought in v4.2.0; it fixes the canonical URL for paginated categories, corrects an API typo, and rectifies a few edge cases. TSF now also supports PHP 8.1.

4.2.0 – Perfect

Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination. – Gene Wilder, Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse

Release highlights

  • This update brings new post-type-archive settings. You can now edit their titles, descriptions, social and visibility settings, and even add redirects on the SEO Settings page.
  • Fancy a custom site title for SEO purposes only? Check out the new title settings.
  • You will find that the sitemap’s stylesheet now has its URLs centered; it also supports mobile devices.
  • Developers can now enjoy using the new tsf() function — an alias of the_seo_framework().
  • If you’re a developer, you should also check out our perfectly tuned memo(). umemo(), and fmemo() functions, which help make TSF so performant.

Psst: Check out our Cyber Sale.

Perfect

TSF is finally what I (Sybre) envisioned it to become when I first named it “The SEO Framework”: It’s lightning-fast, hassle-free, and has all necessary options while giving you the best in class experience. I hope you enjoy what I believe is a perfect product!

To me, The SEO Framework is finished. Done. It’s excellent. This doesn’t mean its journey ends here. Now, it’s time to add features you want. A restyled interface, migration support, custom title generation, more structured data fields, and many other community proposals are under consideration.

A perfect tip

This update comes with updated browser styles and scripts. Not all browsers get these for you; so, the interface might appear broken (and your “inputs” seem to be “removed”). Try a different browser, or clear your favorite browser’s cache. That ought to do the trick.

Environment upgrade notes

WordPress 5.1 through 5.4 are no longer supported. Here’s why:

  • Over 66% of all WordPress sites are using WordPress v5.5 or later.
  • Newer versions of WordPress are faster, more reliable, and easier to work with; for both you and us.
  • Supporting past versions takes time away that’s better used implementing new features.

PHP 5.6 through 7.1 are no longer supported. Here’s why:

  • Almost 80% of all WordPress sites are using PHP v7.2 or later.
  • Newer versions of PHP are faster and more secure. For us, they’re also easier to work with.
  • Again, supporting past versions takes time away that’s better used implementing new features.

Support the development

We hope you’ll love this update as much as we do. Please consider supporting us by sharing a fantastic review, get a license, or do your friends and colleagues a favor by installing TSF for them.

Detailed log

Practice makes perfect. So does working 16 hours a day.

Full changelog

  • You can find the full changelog here.

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Contributors

Support

Issues resolved in last two months:

20 out of 40

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