A nice new SEO plugin for WordPress — called “WordPress SEO – By Yoast”. This SEO plug-in tests out pretty well, especially if you are a beginner and looking to optimize your site. This plug-in helps the author learn more about why the things you are writing in your web design are important for SEO – and why writing is still at the core of SEO. It’s currently in Beta, but you can try it out now.

We’ve used All-In-One-SEO-Pack in the past, and currently use Platinum SEO, which work great for creating specific title tags, and other relevant tagging features, but this plug-in seems to have a future for becoming the best one out there to use in your web design or blog (if it’s not already).

Here’s a short video interview with the creator of Yoast and this new plug-in

A good video from Web Pro News putting SEO in perspective. Website design, proper keyword placement/density, and on-page optimization are not the only things that count. This might be obvious to most search professionals — to get optimized by the search engines and achieve good rankings requires a much broader approach.

On December 04, 2009 Google announced that they will design and customize your search results based on your past search activity even if you are not signed in your Google account. What it means is, the search results you see on your computer may differ slightly from what someone else might see on their computer. Google is now keeping track of your search history from the last 180 days on your browser’s cookies and produce the search results based on your search behavior. You can learn more about this feature on Google’s official blog

This is an important piece of information for all web designers, web developers, website owners and SEO professionals who monitor their website rankings on Google. You will see a difference in search rankings dependent on what computer you are searching on. In order to see the global search results, you can simply turn off this feature from Web History which is shown on top right corner of Google.com. This will tell Google that you do not wish to customize the search results based on search activities performed on that computer.

Google not using the keywords meta tag from your website to rank or index your site is really no surprise. Don’t be concerned about anyone lifting your “keywords” meta data from your website and using it on their web site – simply because it isn’t even used by Google to rank your web site…. This is something that most web developers, web designers and digital strategists working with SEO have known for quite some time, however we have always used the “keywords” meta data in an HTML document anyway. Now, Google simply says “NO” we do not use them… check out the video below: