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User guide

Getting started

Set up the site's identity, switch from another SEO plugin, and read the editor's search preview and content checks.

SEO handles a site’s technical SEO: titles and meta descriptions, canonical and robots tags, Open Graph and Twitter cards, a Schema.org JSON-LD graph, XML sitemaps and breadcrumbs. It adds no dashboard widget, no notices and no score, and problems show up in Site Health.

Install

wp plugin install subset-seo --activate

Every public post type and taxonomy gets titles, tags, schema and a sitemap straight away, from built-in templates. The sitemap index is at /sitemap.xml.

Say who the site is

Open Settings → SEO → General (placeholder — not final) and choose whether the site represents an organization or a person, then give its name and logo. The schema graph uses them on every page, so search engines know who publishes the site.

Coming from another SEO plugin

Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress can all be imported in the import section of Settings → SEO → Tools (placeholder — not final). Choose the plugin, then Preview to see what would change, or Import. The import brings titles, descriptions, focus keyphrases, social fields, robots settings, canonical URLs and primary terms, plus title templates that have an equivalent. It runs in steps, so a large site is fine, and the other plugin’s data is never changed or deleted.

Redirects are not imported here. Redirector has its own importer for them.

Edit a post’s search appearance

Open any post and choose the SEO panel in the editor’s sidebar. Search appearance shows a search result preview, with fields for the post’s own SEO title and meta description. Leave them empty to use the templates set in Settings → SEO → Titles & meta (placeholder — not final). Templates take variables such as %%title%%, %%sep%% and %%sitename%%.

Under Keyphrase and SEO checks, enter the phrase the post should be found for. The checks list what they noticed, sorted into problems, notes and what is good: whether the keyphrase is in the title, the address, the description and the first paragraph, how the post links and whether its images have alt text. Readability does the same for sentence and paragraph length. There is no score.

The classic editor gets the same fields in a meta box, without the checks.

Optional: AI suggestions and IndexNow

Both are off by default, and each sends data to an outside service only when you turn it on:

  • AI suggestions add a Suggest button to the title and description fields, using your own Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter key. A request is sent only when someone clicks it.
  • IndexNow, on the Sitemaps tab, tells participating search engines when content is published, updated or trashed.

What to read next

The developer reference covers the template variables, the filters on every tag, adding schema pieces and sitemaps, the REST API and WP-CLI.