Scribe SEO (affiliate link) works with WordPress blogs and websites to provide easy-to-understand SEO copywriting recommendations. Even if you know SEO, this tool provides feedback right on the blog post interface, making it easy and quick to optimize any post. I’ve been using Scribe for over a month now and I have been very happy with the results.
How it Works
Scribe SEO requires either the Thesis theme (paid) or the All in One SEO plugin (free) since it uses the functionality they provide for rewriting titles, descriptions and keywords. Once you have Scribe installed (which is as easy as any other WordPress plugin), you’ll see a couple of columns in your post dashboard: scribe optimizer & primary keywords, which will be filled out for any post you’ve used Scribe on. There will also be a Scribe Content Optimizer box in the upper right corner of individual post editor.
After you’ve written a post, you’ll need to fill in the Custom Title Tag & Meta Description fields (which are provided by the Thesis theme or the All in One SEO plugin). While meta description fields aren’t used as part of Google’s algorithm, they are useful in providing descriptions to people in search results (people are who we’re interested in, right?). The box in the upper corner will have 3 green checkmarks when the content is ready to be analyzed.
Analyze the post and you’ll get back 6 tabs of useful SEO recommendations and information. The first tab is the SEO score, which shows your overall score plus analysis and recommendations for your title, description and content. Scribe is fairly specific about what you should do to improve your score, which makes it very easy to get a high ranking score.
The keyword analysis tab will show you the primary and secondary keywords for your post, with the frequency, prominence and density for each.
If you’re not happy with the primary keywords, the Change Keywords tab gives you information about how to change the post to change the prominence of keywords.
Next is the Tags tab which gives you a list of relevant terms for your content. These are helpful for adding to the post tags. I’ve found that not all the tags are really super relevant – mostly because some are too broad for my target, but it’s easy to add them all to the post tags and remove the ones that don’t work.
SERP shows you how your post will look in the results of search engines (SERP = search engine results page), which is nice for making sure the listing makes sense to people.
Finally, the SEO Best Practices tab gives you some basic information that you should consider when optimizing your posts (very informative but not specific to the post that was analyzed).
Does it Work?
I’ve been using the Scribe plugin for over a month – not on every post, but on many of the posts I wanted to promote. Taking a look at the post we’ve been following in this post: Understanding Facebook Page Insights – it’s listed on the first page of Google for the keywords “facebook page insights” – not bad.
Another post I optimized, Vanity Searches Should Be an Important Part of Your Routine is on the first page of results for the keywords “vanity searches“. Pretty good.
What’s more exciting is that traffic from search engines is trending upwards in the past month. While not providing conclusive results (yet), Scribe clearly is having an influence on my rankings with Google.
Recommendation
SEO isn’t about blindly following a tool – you should instead use them to make informed decisions. But if you’re looking for a tool to make it much easier to optimize your blog posts or website, I highly recommend giving Scribe SEO a try (affiliate link). Plans start at $27/month for 30 evaluations (which may be enough for most business bloggers) and run up to $97/month for 300 evaluations. You can use the service on an unlimited number of websites since they count only the number of evaluations (evaluation = clicking the analyze button) and can cancel anytime. Even for those of us who know SEO, Scribe makes it much easier to optimize a post which means you’re more likely to do it. While optimizing an entire site structure may still require a consultant, Scribe provides an easy, cost effective way to optimize posts as you write them. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Have you used Scribe SEO? What do you think?
Note: Links to Scribe SEO above are affiliate links. While I may get a few bucks if you signup to use the service using the links, I only recommend products which I feel provide good value to you and that I’ve used or tested. Please feel free to go to the website directly if you prefer. Either way, I’d love to hear your feedback on the product.
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