Assist SEO

Assist SEO gives you clean, standards-based control over how your content appears in search results and when shared on social media — without the weight or upsell noise of larger plugins.

It is built to be fast (nothing is loaded on the front end except the small amount of metadata your pages actually output), safe (every input is sanitised, every output escaped), and cooperative (if another SEO plugin is active, Assist SEO stays out of the page head by default so you never get duplicate tags).

What it does

• Title templates — Per–content-type templates with variables such as %%title%%, %%sitename%%, %%sep%% and more, with per-post overrides.
• Meta descriptions — A manual description per post, with a sensible automatic fallback drawn from the excerpt or content. Assist SEO never fabricates a description from nothing.
• Canonical URLs — Correct canonicals for singular content, archives and paged pages, with a manual override where you need one.
• Robots directives — Per-post noindex / nofollow, reconciled so contradictory directives are never emitted.
• Open Graph & Twitter/X Cards — Optional social markup with image fallbacks (per-post image → featured image → default image → site logo), plus per-post overrides for the social title, description and image.
• Structured data (Schema.org) — A connected JSON-LD graph (WebSite, WebPage, your Organization or Person, Article/BlogPosting, and BreadcrumbList) with stable @id relationships. Advanced users can add their own validated custom JSON-LD, and each post can override its schema type.
• Breadcrumbs — An accessible, server-rendered breadcrumb trail with matching BreadcrumbList schema, available via the [assist_seo_breadcrumbs] shortcode, the assist_seo_breadcrumbs() template function, or automatic insertion above your content.
• Robots.txt additions — Append your own directives to the virtual robots.txt WordPress serves, from the Advanced tab.
• XML sitemap — Extends the built-in WordPress sitemap and automatically excludes anything you mark noindex or exclude per-post.
• Editor integration — A classic meta box (which also appears in the block editor) with a live, approximate Google preview and character counters. An optional block-editor sidebar panel is included as source for developers who build the plugin’s assets.
• Content analysis — A modular set of on-page SEO checks (title and description length, focus keyword placement, content length, subheadings, image alt text, internal and outbound links, featured image) with Good / Needs attention / Problem statuses. Guidance favours natural, reader-first content — never keyword stuffing, and no plugin can promise rankings.
• Redirect manager — Create 301, 302, 307, 308 and 410 (Gone) redirects with plain or regular-expression sources, notes and groups. Includes enable/disable, search, pagination, hit counting, and JSON import/export. Redirect loops and open-redirect/script-injection destinations are blocked, and the front-end lookup is indexed and cached so it stays fast on every request.
• 404 monitor — Logs not-found requests (with hit counts and first/last seen), so you can spot broken links and create a redirect from any entry in one click. Includes search, active/ignored filtering, ignore and delete, a retention cap so the log never grows without bound, and privacy-conscious referrer handling (host and path only — no query strings, no IP addresses) that can be turned off entirely.
• Taxonomy SEO — Per-term SEO for categories, tags and public custom taxonomies: SEO title, meta description, canonical, robots (noindex/nofollow), Open Graph social fields, and sitemap exclusion, added right to the term-edit screens. Term archives output the correct title, description, canonical, robots, Open Graph and Twitter tags, with taxonomy title templates (e.g. %%term%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) and term-level sitemap control.

Built for compatibility

If Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress or The SEO Framework is active, Assist SEO detects it and does not print competing metadata. You can override this from the Advanced tab once you have disabled the other plugin’s output.

This plugin does not make guarantees about search rankings. No plugin can. It gives you correct, well-formed metadata and the controls to manage it; rankings depend on your content and many factors outside any plugin’s control.