My fellow WordPress plugin developer and friend Vladimir Prelovac recently (more like a couple of months ago) kindly offered me the opportunity to review his SEO Smart Links Business WordPress plugin. I was a bit excited to get my hands on his premium plugin since I have been very impressed with all of his WordPress work thus far (see also Vladimir’s WordPress Plug-in Development book). In this post, I’d like to capture some of my thoughts about his new plugin.
What is SEO Smart Links Business?
Briefly, SEO Smart Links Business aims to help WordPress blog owners improve their blog’s onsite SEO by automatically interlinking posts to each other. The goal of this plugin is to alleviate the pain of having to manage internal content linking. The plugin also comes with a bunch of other tools that you may need to help improve your onsite SEO. If you want to know more, I think it’s best if I let you read the detailed list of features on the official product page.
What I Like About It?
Dead simple for anybody to use. All you have to do to link to another post on your site is write the full name of the other post, save, and wha-bam, your link is generated.
Powerful enough for SEO educated individuals. If the custom keywords feature was missing, I would’ve thrown this plugin back in Vladimir’s face and would’ve told him to make it better. I’m glad that he still continues to impress me. This feature is crucial for when you just want to link to your target content using a particular phrase (not the post title of the target content). I use this type of linking a lot on my fitness blog where I would only want to link to a particular post using the phrase “bicep workout” instead of “30 Minute Bicep Workout”.
Limits & Exclusions. I love the limits feature so that way you won’t end up with too many links in one post (making your article look spammy). Also, it would be lame is exclusions didn’t exist. I would hate to link to my about page every time I type the word “about” in a post.
Nofollow & Nofollow white list. Automatically nofollow all external links. Also “nofollow whitelist”, I’ve never seen this feature anywhere else before. Pretty awesome stuff.
Caching. This feature is absolute crucial for large sites.
Redirection Support. This is a nice little redirection tool that you can use to help cloak affiliate links if needed.
The pricing is fair. The Business version of the plugin is really designed for people with extremely large sites, for which the extra caching is crucial for smooth operation.
One Thing I’m Still Iffy About
How the plugin works is that it automatically parses your post for key phrases and then dynamically turn the right key phrases into links (cache it if necessary) and then deliver the linkified content to the user. From what I understand, the original post does not get modified at all. Maybe I am just a control freak, but I am a bit uncomfortable with key phrases being dynamically linkified on my posts. This is because if I were to disable the plugin, all of the links I was counting on to be there will suddenly disappear. I would love it if Vladimir added a feature that automatically linkify your posts as you write them (or even on save). That way automatically generated links will be saved along with the content and the link will persist even if the plugin is disabled.
Verditct
Try out the free version! If you like it and your feel that the premium version has features that will benefit you then make the purchase. Do you use any version of SEO Smart Links? I would love it if you can share your insights and experiences in the comments below.