WooThemes once again showed that they are at the forefront of WordPress development today: they deprecated their WooFramework’s SEO functionality and recommend their users to switch to WordPress SEO by Yoast. I’ve worked closely with Matt Cohen, WooThemes CTO, to build an import functionality for WooThemes users straight into WordPress SEO.
I recently added statistics tracking to my two main plugins, and about 125,000 of you have already kindly agreed to send me some anonymous data. Because of that, I now know that WooThemes Canvas is actually one of the 10 most used themes and is used as a parent theme quite often as well, and their dozens of other themes are very, very popular, so this could mean a lot of new users for my SEO plugin. I welcome you all!
WooSEO Import
The WooSEO import functionality is very simple, activate the WordPress SEO plugin, go to SEO -> Import and you’ll see this:
You can check if the data has imported ok by opening up some posts and seeing if your WordPress SEO box contains the titles and meta descriptions you had entered in WooSEO. If it has imported ok, repeat the process above but check the “Delete the old data” checkbox, this will make sure your database is as clean as can be by deleting the old WooSEO values from the database.
Thank you to WooThemes!
By doing this, WooThemes is finally doing what I’ve been proposing theme companies do for ages now: stop trying to provide an SEO framework and focus on good code, great design and the functionality to change that design. That’s a step I thank & applaud them for and I fully hope other theme vendors will do the same. I’m open to working with everybody on building import functionality when they decide to take this step.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and if you’re a recent “convert” coming from WooSEO, I’d seriously love to hear that too!
Great choices like this are why I use woothemes a fair amount. And add to that I already ignored the built in seo and used YOAST and this is just making life easier! YAY
This is good news. Would be curious to know what you think are the important differences between Woo Canvas and Genesis frameworks and the pros and cons of each.
I wonder if DIYThemes/Thesis will follow suit? (lol)
That’s great news. Deprecating the woothemes SEO functionality will really streamline the process for everyday users.
If you’re an SEOmoz pro member, don’t forget to check our Pro Perks ;)
Oops, I meant “out” not “our”.
Awesome news. WooThemes and WordPress SEO only get better.
I think it’s great that WooThemes is doing this. The WooFramework and Yoast SEO is a powerful combo for any WordPress site!
This is great we’ve been using a combination of Woo Canvas & Yoast SEO for a long time now. Good to hear it’s all coming in one theme install ;-).
This is exciting news and completely explains the framework update I came across this morning in some of my client websites. Congrats Yoast, though I won’t have to use your new importer because I have not once used the built in SEO stuff from Woothemes! Your SEO plugin is just too good. But glad to see them not wasting time on things they don’t need to anymore. Happy Monday!
Boom. Congrats Joost.
Proof of how good your stuff really is..!!
So happy to see this happen. WordPress SEO is a mandatory plugin for me – nothing else comes close. This decision gives the Woo team more time to focus on the other aspects of their products.
great news . .cheer yoast team! i wish to see some more . .
this is awesome. I just actually had to go through the whole charade of disabling their built in SEO framework to remove conflict with WordPress SEO. look forward to the integration
Congratulations to WooThemes and to you for the well deserved recognition! WordPress SEO is an excellent plugin! Keep up the good work!
Congrats, mate!
Well deserved.
I can only say finally. Thank you Yoast for being there :)
That’s fantastic!
Thank you Yoast for your incredible work.
And thank you Woo Themes for recognizing your work there by clearly indicating that they know how to focus on their core competencies in building great themes and a support service on those.
Great stuff Joost!
It’s good news and really I like the way you provided the way to import options. Now we’ll wait for such good decision by Thesis theme developers. They should follow this.
Congratulations – it’s a great plugin and the recognition is well deserved. Since this site is built on Genesis which claims great SEO functionality out of the box – what is the story there? How compatible is the plugin with Genesis? I’m considering Genesis as my next theme.
Genesis does have built-in SEO options, but it first checks to see if you’re running any SEO plugins like WordPress SEO. If you are, Genesis doesn’t run its SEO code.
I’m not sure how the other theme frameworks handle it, but I really like Genesis’ approach of letting you decide what SEO options you want.
That ‘s great to know. It is indeed the best SEO plugin available for the WordPress platform. I am pleased to see that it will be natively available with WooThemes. This not only puts Yoast on the top of preference list but would also give an edge to WooThemes over other WP theme developers when it comes to optimization.
Best of luck :)
Have just found out, that the breadcrumb function is not working properly. Changes within the Yoast plugin configuration are not effective. Any idea?
I’m glad to see this, I use both WooThemes and WordPress SEO. This makes it that much easier for me. Keep up the great work!
So how does one go about preventing all of the Yoast branding etc. from appearing on whitelabel solutions built on top of Woo themes?
What can I say? Excellent choice from WooThemes. Congrats Yoast.
That is awesome. Your plugin is my favorite plugin for SEO work. I had tried once at my friends site and I don’t want to change my existing one. After seeing functionality I took pain and change in all my site. Super awesome news.
I’ve been waiting for WooThemes to depreciate their SEO module for quite a while. It’s never really worked right and I always install Yoast on every WP site I set up anyway. Congrats on another win Yoast, you deserve it!
That’s great… I always change the themes in order to make it compatible with WordPress SEO. That’s good news….
I think that’s a smart choice from WooThemes. I like their work and think they are one of the best in the theme design work. Good news.
Love this plugin…have installed for TONS of sites.
However this problem really has to be addressed: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-permalinks-category-base-problem
Ever since one of the last updates, the plugin will nuke your category URLs every time you update the category settings. The only way to fix the URLs is to go back into WP SEO and click the update button in the permalinks section. Its a pain.
That’s cool and congrats to you guys for earning this “business”
Awesome news. I always used your plugin and ignored the built in woothemes seo feature. Nice to see it gone and yours recommended by the guys at woo. Its funny to see that woo canvas is so popular. I just launched a new client site using woo canvas and came to your site to dl your seo plugin and found this post. Here is the site using canvas http://globalcoffeedeals.com Awesome work and i’m looking forward to trying your video seo plugin.
Awesome article! Really useful tips and inspiration. Now, back to work…
Hi
I have recently installed your plugin and upgraded my Woo Canvas theme and customised the settings for the theme and canvas. Btw. Woo’s SEO has been turned off and given that i did not have any SEO settings before the install, I didnt need to do any import work.
My problem is with my old posts that have been published. I cannot enable Yoast SEO plugin to display the SEO options so that I may edit.
I also have another author on the site and given that they are uncomfortable with making adjustments to SEO, I asked them to save the post as draft. Same problem.
Will you please look into this? I am also adding this to Woo Framework’s support because this is just horrible.
Regards
Q
Two of my favourite things on the web: WooThemes and your SEO plugin. Have been using both for a while now.
I’ve been using your SEO plugin for a few days now with WOOThemes Canvas. It is a breeze to use and the prompts are excellent. Of course, now I have a bit of a mission to go back over a couple of hundred posts to sort out the most important SEO, but hey, what a pleasure.
Your SEO plugin is fantastic.
We have recently started using woocommerce and we are very happy. Is there a chance that you could share your thoughts about woocommerce ?
Thank you
Marcelo
Currently, I am using a combination of wootheme Canvas, wordpress SEO by yoast.com and being hosting in Westhost as recommended by you. But the “Titles & Metas” tabs in SEO section of admin are all blank and don’t show. I can’t figure out the problem. I didn’t use any other plugin.
IF i host using godaddy, it works fine.
If I dont use wootheme Canvas, it works fine.
But if combining the three, the problem comes out.
Wow, amazig. This is good news for me. Thanks WooThemes
how to make special pages become indexed, pls help
WordPress SEO has proven its value when a popular theme maker goes ahead and adopts it as “standard equipment.”