A study of the WordPress SEO plugins for microformats

Abstract

The evolution of technologies puts pressure on organisations upon its digital transformation. The content these organisations make available on the Web and their strategies of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have a real impact in the achievement of the organisations' communication objectives. Marketing departments are increasingly dominated by SEO strategies to achieve the best positions in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's). To achieve the first positions increases the probability of new business opportunities. This paper is focused on semantic SEO, and on the quality of the WordPress SEO plugins that incorporate microformats (free-of-charge versions). We have studied 85 different plugins and concluded that only 20 incorporate truly microformats. We concluded that 95% of the 20 use JSON-LD as mark-up language and the vocabulary schema.org. All of the 20 plugins fall far short of expectations as they exploit very few schema.org types and terms compared to the possibilities of descriptions defined by the theoretical analysis made. To date, if an organisation needs to incorporate microformats in its Website Wordpress based contents, it will have to pay to a programmer to do this, or use the paid versions pulgins, as the free plugins do not provide quality tools.